Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
approach. First, the toxicity issue: will eating GM products affect our
health, modify how certain organs function, now or in the future? Tox-
icity measures and tests are provided to assess this matter. Secondly,
the dissemination issue: will growing GM crops affect the environment
so much as to provoke substantial ecological changes in living species,
in other categories of plants? Ecological assessment is currently being
developed but more time is needed to be able to draw conclusions. Fur-
thermore, will it reduce biodiversity?
The toxicity issue has been dealt with from the outset, in the early
eighties and outcrossing, at the very end of the pre-market tests in the
mid-1990s. This recent history gives us insights on choices made at the
time that precluded the adoption of broader safety practices, aimed at
mitigating environmental risk for example.
TheImplicationsofaProductSafetyModelVersusaProcess
SafetyModel
At the beginning, the kind of safety assessment performed by the various
institutions in charge of the food safety standards, when authorizing GM
products on the market, mainly focused on the intrinsic qualities of the
product. This has been (and still is) especially the case for the American
philosophy toward GMOs and less so for the struggling EU philosophy,
embodied by the European Food Safety Authority.
In retrospect there has been much consideration of the qualities and
performance of products per se, and less so of their possible interac-
tions in the field with other plants and species or deterioration at storage
sites. Consequently, safety has mainly been dealt with in two ways: First,
through the assessment of each novel GM trait. For example, the safety
of a particular protein regarding toxicity is assessed using animal feed-
ing tests; secondly, through the assessment of the unforeseen changes in
plant metabolism as a result of gene transfer. Therefore, at first safety
issues involved in growing, storing, or exporting the GM plants were not
seen as part of the scope. They were left out.
