Wales and Other EU Regions Opted Out of Growing GM Crops in 2015

In the autumn of 2015 Wales told the European Commission that it did not want genetically modified crops grown on Welsh farmland. It was one of a long list of governments to do so: by the deadline of 3 October 2015, nineteen EU member states had asked to keep some or all of their territory free of GM crop cultivation, including the UK on behalf of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and Belgium on behalf of Wallonia.

The news was widely shared as “Wales bans GMOs”. That headline was half right. The opt-outs did stop the planting of GM crops in those places, but they did not ban GM food, GM animal feed or imports, and they were not based on any finding that GM crops are unsafe. Here is what actually happened, why it happened, and what has changed since.

The rule that made the opt-outs possible

For years the EU approved GM crops centrally, through a scientific risk assessment by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and a vote by member states. Countries that wanted to block a crop at home had to invoke a “safeguard clause” and produce new scientific evidence of harm. Several did, including France, Germany and Poland with Monsanto’s insect-resistant maize MON810, even though EFSA judged several of those national bans scientifically unjustified.

In March 2015 the EU changed the rules. A new directive let member states restrict or ban the cultivation of EU-approved GM crops on their territory for reasons that have nothing to do with health or environmental safety, such as agricultural policy, land use, town and country planning, coexistence with conventional and organic farming, or socio-economic concerns. It offered two routes:

During authorisation: a country could ask for its territory to be left out of a company’s application. The company then had 30 days to accept or object.
After authorisation: a country could adopt its own national measures restricting a single GM crop or a whole group of crops or traits.

For crops already approved or in the pipeline, the transitional deadline to ask for an exclusion was 3 October 2015. That is why so many announcements arrived within a few weeks.

Who opted out, and what Wales did

In Wales the decision was announced by Rebecca Evans, then Deputy Minister for Farming and Food. The Welsh Government asked for Wales to be excluded from the cultivation of MON810 and the seven other GM maize varieties then awaiting EU approval, in line with its long-standing restrictive stance on GM farming.

Across the EU, the US Department of Agriculture counted nineteen member states requesting opt-outs by mid-October. Seventeen applied to their whole territory: Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland and Slovenia. Two applied to regions only: Belgium for Wallonia, and the UK for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, leaving England out. Most requests covered MON810 and all seven pipeline maizes; Denmark and Luxembourg excluded MON810 and three of the seven.

Campaigners at the time noted that the opt-out countries covered roughly two thirds of the EU’s population and farmland. Greenpeace’s food policy director Franziska Achterberg said governments “don’t trust EU safety assessments” and called on the Commission to pause new approvals.

What the bans did, and did not, change

The practical effect on fields in 2015 was small. The only GM crop authorised for cultivation in the EU was MON810, a maize engineered to resist the European corn borer, and it was grown in only five member states, above all Spain, with smaller areas in Portugal and a few others. None of those five countries opted out, so, as the USDA noted, current planting did not change.

Just as important is what the opt-outs did not touch:

GM food and feed imports continued. The EU imports tens of millions of tonnes of GM soy and maize every year, mostly for animal feed. Imports are authorised at EU level and were not affected.
Labelling stayed the same. Across the EU, food and feed containing more than 0.9 percent approved GM material must be labelled and traceable. That rule applied in all member states before and after 2015.
Safety assessments stayed central. EFSA still assessed every GM product. The opt-outs were explicitly about non-safety grounds.

So “17 countries ban GMOs” is better described as “17 countries, plus regions of two others, chose not to let GM crops be grown on their land”. Many earlier headlines also counted countries inconsistently, calling Poland the fourteenth or Wales the sixteenth to “ban GMOs”, but the official tally was nineteen member states, two of them regional.

What the science says about GM crop safety

Much of the 2015 coverage suggested that eating GM food carried long-term health risks. The largest independent review since then does not support that. In 2016 the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine examined more than 900 studies and reports and found “no substantiated evidence of a difference in risks to human health” between approved GM crops and conventionally bred ones. It compared long-term health data from the US and Canada, where GM foods have been eaten since the 1990s, with the UK and western Europe, where they largely have not, and found no differences in specific health problems.

The same report found real issues of a different kind: weeds that have evolved resistance to glyphosate where herbicide-tolerant crops were overused, some insect pests adapting to Bt crops where resistance management was ignored, and concerns about seed costs for smaller farmers. Those are farming, economic and governance questions, and they are exactly the kind of reasons the 2015 directive allowed countries to weigh. A country can reasonably decide it does not want GM cultivation because of its farming model, its organic and export markets or public opinion, without claiming the food is dangerous.

What has changed since 2015

Brexit. After the UK left the EU, rules on GM crops became a matter for each part of the UK. England passed the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act in 2023, which applies only in England and eases the rules for some gene-edited plants. Wales and Scotland did not follow and have kept their more cautious positions.

Gene editing in the EU. The bigger change is the arrival of new genomic techniques such as CRISPR, which can make small, targeted changes without adding genes from other species. In December 2025 EU negotiators reached a political agreement on a new framework, and member states confirmed it on 24 April 2026, with 18 capitals in favour and several opposed or abstaining. Under the agreement, “category 1” plants with changes considered equivalent to conventional breeding would be exempt from GMO rules and from food labelling, although their seeds would be labelled; more complex “category 2” plants would stay under GMO rules. The European Parliament gave its final approval in June 2026 (Fresh Produce Consortium), and the framework is expected to apply from around mid-2028.

Conventional GM crops. For classic GM crops, the 2015 picture still largely holds: MON810 remains the only one authorised for cultivation, grown mainly in Spain and Portugal, while GM imports for feed continue.

Key points to remember

Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wallonia, along with 17 EU countries, opted out of growing GM crops under a March 2015 EU directive.
The opt-outs concerned cultivation only, not imports, food, feed or labelling.
They were allowed on policy grounds, not because GM crops were found to be unsafe; major scientific reviews have found approved GM foods as safe to eat as their conventional counterparts.
Debates have since moved on to gene editing, which the EU is set to regulate under a separate, lighter regime for the simplest edits.

The 2015 opt-outs are best understood as a political compromise: the EU kept one scientific approval system, and each country gained the right to say what grows in its own soil.

Sources: World Grain, 13 October 2015: 19 EU nations opt out of GM crop cultivation; Wikipedia: Genetically modified food in the European Union; Penn State News, 2016: National Academies review of genetically engineered crops; ANSA, 24 April 2026: EU countries confirm agreement on new genomic techniques for plants; original report: True Activist.

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