risk assessment

The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) responsible for the environmental risk assessment of GMOs - or more accurately: reponsible for reading the papers submitted by companies who want to import or cultivate their GM crops in the EU - invites comments on its updated Guidance Document of the Scientific Panel on Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO)for the risk assessment of genetically modified plants and derived food and feed.
Deadline is 21 September, and details are availabe at the EFSA website

This report by Ricarda Steinbrecher (German Federation of Scientists, VDW and Econexus) with Antje Lorch provides an overview of risk assessment and risk management issues of genetically engineered trees. It was prepared for the Ninth Conference of Parties to the Convention on Biodiversity (COP9) in Bonn, May 2008.

The report presented here shows the many ways Bt maize impacts the environment. Even after more then a decade of commercial growing of Bt maize crops, the risk assessment studies are still few and most of them tend to raise more open questions than solving concerns.

Since it became common knowledge that fossil oil supplies won't stretch endlessly, a hectic search started for other sources of oil. Especially the debate about so-called 'biofuels' or 'agrofuels' was high on the agenda in the last months, even though problems become obvious. GM agrofuels will also bring their own problems.

In the growing season 2006, Greenpeace sampled leaves from commercially cultivated MON810 in Germany and Spain and found that Bt contents were very variable and often very low, but also that even 10 years into the cultivation of Bt crops, there is no standardised method to determine Bt contents. The results are published in this report.

Scientists in the UK put 16 lines of three different GM potatoes under a range of stress situations and then studied the quantities of two main groups of secondary, toxic metabolites. They found significant differences. An argument why it is necessary to study GM crops under realistic conditions.

Some more details on recent findings on the EFSA opinions about the MON863 hybrids MON863xMON810, MON863xNK603 and MON863xMON810xNK603 (EFSA 2005):

This new report, written on behalf of Greenpeace, shows that no serious investigation was conducted on the effects of Bt11 maize on the environment and on animals feeding on it. Why does EFSA accepts a notification that lacks so much information, and why does it discard the existing scientific literature?
The report shows that no serious investigation was conducted on the toxicity of this GM maize or its impact on the environment, such as detrimental effects on useful or protected insect species. Furthermore, already published scientific results on possible negative environmental consequences of this GM maize were widely ignored by EFSA.