Major international reports agree that our way of producing food must become more sustainable. This cannot be achieved by 1. yesterday's methods, but only with new approaches, since today's circumstances have never existed before (size of the world's population, globalised trade, climate change) and 2. will not succeed with one or a couple but only with a whole set of solutions. One possible approach is more precise breeding with genome editing.

Whether this new technology can contribute to greater sustainability in agriculture depends on a number of external factors: For which agricultural practice is it used? How differentiated does regulation deal with the very different applications? What about consumer acceptance?

Finally, the question is how it will affect Europe and its place in the world if technology becomes standard in other countries. What problems will trade, producers and consumers face? What do these groups expect from politics?