'The EU is the world's biggest wheat exporter – a position Russia would love to topple for political and economic reasons'

The grain harvest is moving into gear across Europe and it is clear there will be a weather impact.

In broad terms the south, which gained from the jet-stream being in the right place, has fared well from having heat and moisture at the right times. Northern countries have had the wrong type of jet-stream and too much rain, which even affected the start of the harvest in France and Germany. The outcome for wheat in particular could be a drop in yields and quality, leaving the EU with less grain to export.

This is where global politics and weather come together in the battle between Russia and the EU over the war in Ukraine.

The EU is the world's biggest wheat exporter – a position Russia would love to topple for political and economic reasons. Putin has sought to anger the West by cosying up to China, North Korea and a number of former Soviet states. But he has gone beyond this with countries that rely on importing grain, using Russia's plentiful supplies to weaken efforts to impose sanctions on Russia. It is active on global markets, with the EU losing out recently to Russia in a big contract tender from Egypt; Russia has also been developing closer trading ties in Africa and with India. For Putin this is less about making money from grain sales that undermining European export success.

He resents the strength of European support for Ukraine and the efforts the EU has made to import agricultural products from Ukraine when he wants to weaken its economy. He would see toppling the EU as the world's biggest wheat exporter as a psychological and economic victory in a long war and that message has been made clear to traders in Russia. This would also allow Putin to claim Western sanctions have been ineffective and he knows that plays out well for a domestic audience questioning the success of his campaign in Ukraine.

One of the promises of Brexit was that it would allow UK agriculture to be more productive and efficient, because it would no longer be weighed down by European bureaucracy. We know now this did not happen, but there is one area where it did. This is over legislation to allow gene editing.

This was a Brexit success the last government did little to celebrate, but it would have been worth doing so as it opens up access to 'good' technology. Gene editing is not genetic modification. It accelerates conventional breeding by altering the genome to maximise the impact of plosive genes, be those for growth, disease or drought resistance.

This week a scientist has started asking people to send snails by post as part of research to establish why some plant varieties are better protected naturally against snails. The aim is to establish what genes give this protection, paving the way for them to be used as a natural non-chemical defence against damage. This is good science and to its credit the last government made a sound case for its use, which has proved effective in heading off criticism.

Cross into the EU and things are very different. There they refer to gene editing as novel genomic techniques (NGTs) and successive EU presidencies have promised and failed to get this legislation over the line. The last presidency Belgium, pushed this issue hard but failed. The new proficiency, Hungary, has hinted it wants to go back to square one to look again at the issues preventing approval.

This is the Brussels equivalent of kicking for touch to delay a decision yet again. The problems in Europe are around suggestions that products where NGTs have been used for ingredients should, under some circumstances, be labelled. This would mean accepting the products are different, when unlike GM they are not. It is only the plant genome that has been manipulated to accelerate what years of conventional plant breeding could achieve. This is not about consumer protection or even consumer choice.

It is about seeking to demonise a scientific technique, despite the waning power in Europe of the green lobby. If this succeeds, the result would be to make European agriculture less completive and less green, because work in gene editing is focussed around reduced chemical use. We know that when it comes to decisions the best committee is a committee of one.

Over NGTs the EU is yet again proving a committee of 27 member states cannot make a sound decision based purely on science.