Research and Innovation

From wheat to kiwi, biotech agricultural varieties are ready to arrive in the fields (and on tables)

The final green light from Brussels for Tea (Assisted Evolution Techniques) is expected in April, but Italian experimentation on crops resistant to pathogens and climate change is well advanced. The knot over patents remains to be untied

by Alessio Romeo

9 February 2026

I pomodori sono tra gli ortaggi su cui è in corso la sperimentazione con le Tecniche di evoluzione assistita

4' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

4' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

Durum wheat, barley and rice, but also grapevine, citrus, kiwi, apple, tomato and aubergine. These are the main Italian crops on which varietal research is being carried out using new biotechnologies, the Assisted Evolution Techniques (Tea), thanks to the renewal of the national authorisation for field trials for 2026. And with the halt to geolocation to prevent the vandalism that affected the first field trials of new rice varieties in Lombardy and grapevines in Veneto: where the tests take place will therefore remain a secret.

But the (public, no small detail) research is ready to be transferred to the seed market and from there to the entire agri-food chain in a very short time, pending the European regulation authorising cultivation and marketing on which the EU institutions have reached an initial agreement. Today, in the absence of a specific regulation, teas are equated (by an EU Court of Justice ruling in 2018) with GMOs, which are banned by almost all member states (without the need for any particular justification, as reiterated by a ruling on Thursday on the legitimacy of the Italian ban).

What is Tea or Ngt

Tea (Assisted Evolution Techniques) or NGT (from the acronym for New Genomic Techniques) are biotechnological innovations for the genetic improvement of crops aimed at obtaining more productive varieties that are resistant to climatic stresses. Unlike GMOs (Genetically Modified Organisms) they do not involve the insertion of foreign DNA (transgenesis) but modify the internal genome (cisgenesis or editing) by accelerating natural mutations.

After the OK in the Environment Committee of the European Parliament, the regulation should be voted on by the EU Council on 30 March and then return to the plenary at the end of April.

The new rules divide Tea into two categories. The first, within a certain number of modifications (20) to the plant's DNA, will be assimilated to traditional varieties, thus with the labelling obligation limited to seeds, while the second also includes old-generation GMOs, which differ from the Tea due to the use of genes foreign to the plant. The last knot to untie remains that of patents, with a compromise aimed at protecting investments, but tempering the monopoly with some constraints to guarantee accessibility to small producers.

The role of public research

In Italia, theCREA, the body supervised by Masaf, remains the point of reference for scientific research on Tea through the project called 'Tea4It', which aims to develop varieties that are resilient to the climate crisis and less in need of water. The research focuses on the sequencing of the main Italian crops, developed using genomic editing techniques and classified as Ngt 1, to "identify key genes and design increasingly precise interventions inspired by natural processes, guaranteeing high standards of safety and transparency. The new edited plants,' Crea explains, 'will be subjected to rigorous genetic analysis and tested in the field to confirm the correspondence between laboratory results and real environmental conditions.

Farmers in favour

After the victorious battle against GMOs, today all the main agricultural organisations are in favour of Tea.
"New biotechnologies, with a broad spectrum of use, can respond to a series of challenges, from disease resistance to environmental stresses, from which agriculture suffers," emphasises Stefano Masini, Coldiretti environment manager. Companies are called upon to invest in innovation and sustainable production, but they suffer from a long regulatory deficit. In fact, the proposal under discussion dates back to 2023, five years later than the 2018 ruling that already placed the new mutagenesis techniques in a long tradition of safety, distinguishing them from GMOs, because they work on the same dna of the species, accelerating a natural process".

A levee for multinationals?

On the accessibility of patents, 'the text should be clarified', comments Masini. "Overcoming the initial request to prohibit them, there is a soft formula that allows them to be filed but with the obligation to cede their use to small producers, with case-by-case evaluations". A kind of tempering of the monopoly to take into account the general utility. This is important in order to ensure that Teas are not the prerogative of large multinationals but the object of public research, through broad licences that allow for participatory use.

'Public funding,' continues Masini, 'serves to exclude multinationals from monopolising research and standardisation. It is no coincidence that Tea research is being done in universities, which are studying our traditional varieties by incorporating genetic innovations more quickly than would happen in nature'.

This is the big difference with the 'old GMOs', which were born and died on the big commodities: soya, maize, rapeseed, cotton and tobacco. "The economic premise has completely changed: GMOs were the mirror of a globalised agriculture where food travels as a commodity; here we move from a pool of multinationals that impose the same glyphosate-resistant maize grain on everyone to the construction of a research system for the benefit of a distinctive agriculture, which contrasts the model linked to returns of scale with the protection of the value of supply chains and the diversification of production at a territorial level. An agriculture such as the Italian one,' Masini concludes, 'had nothing to gain from GMOs but can receive economic and environmental benefits from these technologies, with potentially immediate results and the possibility of recovering a piece of Made in Italy sovereignty'.