How should we regulate GMOs?

CI’s Satya Sharma looks at regulations on modern biotechnologies and how they address consumers’ concerns.

Many countries are apprehensive about the impact of agricultural biotechnology on the environment and on consumers’ health.

In addition to concerns about biosafety, issues around plant diversity, the moral and social dilemma of tampering with nature, legal issues regarding ownership of genetic materials, and religious concerns have also arisen.

Some would prefer to ban genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) entirely, others have proposed labelling schemes, either voluntary (eg, ‘GMO free’) or mandatory (eg, ‘contains genetically modified soy’ or ‘contains soy genetically modified to increase herbicide resistance’) to identify the products of modern biotechnology to consumers.

To address these concerns, governments are enacting a wide range of regulatory proposals on production, processing and distribution mechanisms of biotechnology.

Appropriate regulatory responses depend on the nature of GMOs and consumer interest in the development and diffusion of modern biotechnology.

At the recent conference, Modern Biotechnologies: Sustainable Innovation and Regulatory Needs,  in Penang, Malaysia, I had the opportunity to learn how current regulations address consumers’ concerns about existing and emerging biotechnologies, specifically on the regulations relating to technologies which alter the genetic structure of an organism.

Globally, opinions are divided about the best form of regulation to address consumer concerns about GMO.
It was generally agreed at the conference that regulatory agencies should consider adopting rules or policy statements regarding the criteria they will include in their risk assessments.

For example, rules pertaining to access to information (labelling) should be made clear so that consumers can make informed choices about modern biotechnology.

GMO regulations

When adopting policy statements, it was recommended that agencies give notice to the public with an invitation to submit comments concerning the outcome.

Public participation in the decision making process can provide policy makers with valuable information that they may not have access to through any other channels.

Interestingly, countries that have passed GMO regulations allow consumer participation and access to information.

Consumers in developed countries are better informed compared to those in developing countries, which need to strive to increase consumer participation in the decision-making process.

Other common areas of interest that emerged from the conference were:

• Supporting countries in implementing the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, which acknowledges the need to establish comprehensive criteria for GMO risk assessment
•  Developing improved methodologies, techniques and protocols for greater understanding of the risks
•  Risk assessments based on scientific procedures

The conference brought together major players from the fields of biotechnology, science, experts from intergovernmental organisations, scientific institutions, consumer and environmental interest groups, industry, government regulators, policy makers, and the media.

Hopefully, this conference will help countries begin to develop a comprehensive and specific legal and institutional framework to govern modern biotechnologies.

The GMO debate - battle lines thicken...

Julius Mugwagwa, Project Coordinator of the CI Biosafety Project, reports back from Kenya where the Biosafety Project workshop and First all-Africa Congress on Biotechnology took place:

"The last two weeks of September 2008 brought Africa in general and Kenya specifically under the spotlight as far as the science of genetic engineering and its products are concerned.

First, for three gruelling days from 17 to 19 September, more than 20 participants representing consumer and civil society organisations from 10 African countries met in Nairobi and deliberated on campaigning and advocacy strategies under the auspices of Consumer International’s Biosafety Project funded by the European Commission.

The tensions that exist between different stakeholders as countries battle to develop and implement biosafety regulatory systems were very clear; and could not have been epitomised more vividly than by the discussions on the Biosafety Bill in Kenya.

Pressures from different interest group were well documented, with consumer organisations bemoaning being pushed out of the policy space by corporate interests and other pro-technology players in the issue. The workshop discussed and shared experiences on how to deal with these issues, recognising the importance of the local context in all this. Experiences were also heard from Brazil and South Korea.

In the end, participants agreed on concrete steps to take in ensuring that the consumer voice is heard in the biotechnology debate, seeing as it is that the tensions between various interest groups are nowhere near termination. Special thanks to the European Commission, the Commonwealth Foundation, Hivos and the CI Council for funding this workshop, and Consumer Information Network (CIN), Kenya for being excellent local organisers and hosts of this milestone event.

In the week following the consumer organisations’ meeting, more than 400 researchers, scientists, policy makers, representatives of multinational companies and international organisations, government officials, media practitioners and others gathered in Nairobi from all parts of the world for what was dubbed the First all-Africa Congress on Biotechnology.

The Congress aimed to take stock of the current biotechnology activities on the continent, with the aim of discussing and assessing how best the continent can harness the technology to address pressing socio-economic challenges. The Congress was clearly pro-biotechnology, judging from the different groups and individuals in attendance, the presentations made and the main messages from the presentations. One senior civil servant from the Kenyan government even had the temerity to say ‘let’s push civil society out of the debate arena … they are distorting the messages going to our farmers’. Talk about throwing all caution to the wind!

Meanwhile, the CI Biosafety Project continues with the campaigning and advocacy capacity-building efforts with two more regional workshops - one in Sao Paulo (Brazil) from 25 to 27 November for partners in Latin America; and the other in Jakarta (Indonesia) from 10 to 12 December, for partners from Indonesia and Azerbaijan and selected countries from the Asia-Pacific region."

More information on these workshops and other activities of the Biosafety Project can be obtained from Julius Mugwagwa.