Europe Again Risks Inventing a Future and Giving It Away to China

In her article entitled The future is fermented: How Europe can succeed in the next industrial race, posted on the website of the European Council on Foreign Relations, Janka Oertel argues that biomanufacturing will become a key technology behind the next industrial revolution. She warns that China has already invested actively and systematically in this sector, while Europe, with its strong fundamental science, patents and individual strong companies, risks repeating the mistakes it made in solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles: inventing a technology, creating demand via regulation, and then ceding all profits and geopolitical leverage.

Behind this well-founded anxiety there is a well-known European scenario. Ms. Oertel points out, rightly and thoroughly, Europe’s real strengths: leadership in a number of patents and key technologies; strong industrial clusters, especially in Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland; holding much of the global precision fermentation capacity; skilled talent and regulated demand created by European legislation. At the same time, she shows how far behind Europe is right now – in terms of scale, prompt decision-making, access to cheap energy and ‘patient’ capital, and industrial policy.

We can observe a gap between a strong science and weak industrial scaling. European companies often create key microbial strains, technologies and equipment, but real production is increasingly scaled up in China – with its far cheaper energy, more public support, greater willingness to support companies through years of low profits, and much faster permitting. China already controls more than 70 percent of global basic fermentation capacity and purposefully creates a holistic ecosystem of five interconnected pillars: patient capital, industrial infrastructure, cheap energy, access to feedstock – particularly feed crops and biomass – and active use of artificial intelligence.

In practice, the European approach looks too slow, cautious, and fragmented. The regulatory delays, especially for novel foods, genetically modified organisms and biological plant protection products, remain too long – often several times longer than in the USA or China. An investment gap and lack of sufficiently strong and stable demand for competitively priced green products keep private capital out of large-scale projects. Until now, European politicians too often perceive biomanufacturing as a niche sustainability or climate-related sector rather than a strategic game-changing technology for a number of critical areas: chemicals, foods, materials, energy, pharmaceuticals, and even defense.

Most importantly, a possible lag in this field could have even more serious and longer-lasting implications than in the case of solar panels, batteries, or EVs. Biomanufacturing is not only a matter of industrial competitiveness: it is also about food security, independence in critical materials, pharmaceutical sovereignty, and defense technology. Should Europe cede leadership in this field now, it risks becoming dependent for an even broader and more sensitive range of supply chains than now.

The author examines in detail how China has already prioritized biomanufacturing, alongside artificial intelligence, in its fifteenth five-year plan, selected dozens of flagship products and companies, and is creating pilot plants and building the whole ecosystem coherently. And Europe still confines itself to strategies, declarations of intent, individual programs, and the hope that its research superiority will endure on its own.

The article shows, in a good and unambiguous manner, at what critical a juncture Europe is now. It has world-class science, strong companies, industrial clusters and an enormous domestic market. But it lacks the speed, scale, cheap energy, patient public capital and strategic resolve already being shown by China. As long as European politicians continue treating biomanufacturing as just another ‘green’ sector or climate project, not as a matter of industrial, technological or geopolitical survival, its risk of repeating old mistakes remains extremely high. Europe may again invent key elements of the future – and again allow other countries to capture, scale up and control that future.

Original publication: https://ecfr.eu/publication/the-future-is-fermented-how-europe-can-succeed-in-the-next-industrial-race/