Scientist Excluded from Iowa Water Study Launches Regulatory Push

A scientist removed from a water study in Iowa is now leading a grassroots campaign to regulate industrial farming impacts on water quality. The campaign links factory farming to environmental and public health issues.

European think-and-do tank the Ministry of Future Affairs has opened applications for the New Foods RegLab, a two-day programme in Brussels where up to ten companies preparing EU novel food applications will work through their regulatory strategies with experienced dossier specialists. Anonymised findings from the first cohort, scheduled for January 2027, will go to the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and the European Commission. The pilot accompanies a paper by Anna Handschuh, the think tank’s founder and managing director, and Dr. Anne-Gaelle Collot, published on 15 October as Building on Draghi: Cross-Border Learning With the New Foods RegLab. The paper proposes that EU countries set up voluntary platforms to share what they and applicants learn during the approval process. The platforms would grant no authorisations and leave safety standards unchanged, so the think tank says a group of Member States could set them up without changing EU law. Novel foods outside the Biotech Act sandboxes The proposal comes as novel foods remain outside the regulatory sandbox provisions of the EU Biotech Act. When the Commission presented the first Biotech Act in December 2025, its proposal excluded novel foods from the sandbox scheme while expanding the pre-submission advice EFSA offers applicants. Anna Handschuh, founder and managing director of the Ministry of Future Affairs, explained, “The EU wants to introduce a much broader pre-submission advice for novel-food applicants. However this would only help one applicant at a time. Shared cross-border learning platforms as enhanced collaboration mechanisms can inform a whole system and support food safety, competitiveness, and strategic autonomy.” EU rules allow about 18 months for a novel food approval, nine of which are reserved for EFSA’s scientific opinion. According to the paper, which draws on an independent analysis of 292 applications submitted between 2018 and 2024, reaching an EFSA opinion takes 31 months on average and has taken as long as 76. The Commission’s decision phase of up to seven months begins only after that. Singapore’s equivalent timeline is nine to 12 months. The Ministry of Future Affairs argues the EU rules themselves work, and the problem is that applicants, consultants and national authorities each learn how to navigate them separately, with no system for sharing what they learn. The RegLab follows the approach of the UK Food Standards Agency (FSA), which received £1.6 million in government funding to set up a regulatory sandbox for cultivated meat and seafood. The sandbox programme launched in February 2025 and runs until February 2027, and the FSA and Food Standards Scotland have since used it to publish guidance for cultivated meat applicants. UK companies are encouraged to apply for the RegLab cohort. “The UK’s regulatory sandbox for cultivated meat has shown very well how regulatory learning should be organised to enable the regulator to keep pace with scientific development and thereby guarantee high food-safety standards,” said Handschuh. Cohort details and legislative proposals Atova Regulatory Consulting will lead the workshop under the Chatham House Rule. Sessions will review each company’s regulatory position and next steps, alongside a policy session on EFSA’s expanded pre-submission advice. The cohort will include non-competing companies of different sizes and product categories, and applicants based outside the EU are eligible. A complete dossier or fully developed regulatory strategy is not required. The project is supported by the Dutch Province of Zuid-Holland, LIOF and ROM-Nederland, and applications close on 30 November 2026. “If embedded in EU legislation, Biotech Act I and II could provide a space to enable regulatory learning, without changing a single safety requirement,” Handschuh said.

Read source: Vegconomist