GM Crop Safety Analysis – Time for a Rethink

A paper published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry implies that regulation on compositional equivalence may no longer be justified, based on a review of 20 years of literature on the subject. Paper co-authors Rod A. Herman of Dow AgroSciences and retired US FDA officer William D. Price found that in 148 GM crops approved in the US and 189 submissions in Japan, there is substantial equivalence of the GM crops to their conventional counterparts. This covers the full range of trait modifications in GM soybean, canola and cotton, tomato, potato and raspberry in more than 80 peer reviewed publications.

Hence, the paper highlights the evidence that genetic modification is less disruptive of crop composition compared with traditional breeding. The authors further concluded that, "The merits of continuing to generally require compositional analysis of GM crops to inform safety seems dubious given the results of 20 years of research, and if agreement can be reached that these studies are no longer warranted, use of this technology will become accessible to a wider array of scientists."

See the news article at http://www.abca.com.au/news/ and original research article at http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jf400135r.