U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue is a pro-science agriculture advocate, arguing it's the best way to address climate change and sustainability without impacting poor people and those in developing nations.
What is less clear is how willing the European Union is to negotiate its 2001 biotechnology regulations at a time when courts are using those to argue that food strains created using mutagenesis, including those already considered part of the organic process, must be labeled as Genetically Modified Organisms - GMOs.
The activist group GMWatch is worried that if government chooses to rework regulations so to avoid making many mutagenesis-derived organic foods illegal, it could open the door to new foods such as CRISPR and RNAi and keep them from being banned under a broad GMO classification. They've been mobilizing their political base saying that negotiations by the EU are "a dangerous development that could further weaken the already problematic GMO risk assessment by EFSA" but American Soybean Association vice president Kevin Scott also believes the EU wants to modernize.
They should. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative claims Europe's lengthy GMO approval process has cost U.S. farmers approximately $2 billion per year, which means European farmers have suffered even more. At the British National Farmers Union annual meeting local farmers' stated they didn't want to change animal welfare standards but seem to have no problem with GMOs now that they are out of the EU. Activists are saying that Bayer is in control of U.K. science policy.
Europe may continue to block use of certain pesticides, compounds that environmentalists believe might be endocrine disruptors, or odd concerns like chicken without the foodborne illness prevented by chlorination, but the EU could be increasingly isolated.