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2022-03-20 |

Japan: Genome-edited food companies find inventive ways to promote products

Possibly due to the high price, sales of genome-edited tomatoes are not doing too well, and the developer Sanatech Seed and the manufacturer Pioneer Ecoscience decided to distribute seedlings free of charge to welfare facilities for the elderly and the disabled as well as elementary schools. The opposition movement against this distribution is gathering strength. On January 27, the OK Seed Project, which started self-labeling seeds and seedlings to make it possible to identify them as non-genome-edited crops, held a press conference to announce that it had collected signatures from people opposing the free distribution and submitted them to the two companies and other organizations. The 9,195 signatures were sent to governors, superintendents of schools, and disability welfare departments across the country and it was also reported that the lobbying of municipalities is strengthening.