How Italy’s Agri-Business Softened the Country’s Opposition to GMOs

On a late spring day in 2024, 200 genetically modified (GM) rice plants left the clinical confines of a Milan university lab and, for the first time in nearly two decades, were planted in an Italian field.

Present on that farm that day in Mezzana Bigli, a small town in the northern province of Pavia, was an enthusiastic group of plant scientists, politicians and representatives of Italy’s powerful farming sector. They were there to mark a turning point in the country’s agricultural policy that, until then, made this kind of use of GM plants impossible.

“It was like a big party,” Vittoria Brambilla, an associate professor of botany at the University of Milan and lead researcher of the GM project, called Ris8imo (risottimo), told The Parliament.

She recalled retired colleagues in attendance who were “really happy to come celebrate this new wave that we were seeing in Italy.”

Many of them had had their work destroyed over the years by anti-GMO activists. The same fate would await Ris8imo, which was testing whether a new genetic modification tool, Crispr-Cas, could make the plant resistant to a fungal disease, called rice blast, in real-world conditions.