The Sustainability Council and the Centre for Integrated Research in Biosafety have issued a joint statement criticising Australian and New Zealand regulators for failing to resist an attempt by GM plant developers to have them abandon a fundamental principle of food safety testing.
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The two organisations pointed out that although the internationally accepted practice for assessing the safety of a GM food is to compare it with the closest non-GM relative, last December, Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) recommended approving a new GMO as safe for human consumption even though the studies submitted in support of its safety compared it to another GMO variety that has no history of safe use.
The GMO in question was Monsanto’s ‘high lysine’ GM corn (called LY038), an animal feed that is unlike any GM corn varieties commercialised to date due to its substantially different nutritional profile, the groups said.
In its statement, the Sustainability Council and the Centre for Integrated Research in Biosafety stressed that comparison with a non-GM example is considered the standard because of its long history of safe use as a food for people.
“The deeper issue is the precedent-setting nature of any decision to approve a new GMO on the basis of studies that do not consistently test it against its conventional counterpart,” the joint statement said. “If New Zealand and Australia deem that abandoning the international standard is acceptable in this case, they may lose the ability to use it to challenge future GM crops that also rely on GMOs as test comparators.
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By GlobalData“Further, once one GM bio-industrial product is accepted as a food on this basis, the stage is set for a raft of other products – including plants producing industrial and medical substances – to be approved using this lower safety standard. The novelty of this wave of new GMOs should be driving adherence to the highest standards, rather than the breach of a key safety principle.”
The groups have urged New Zealand Minister for Food Safety Annette King, who now has just five days to respond to the FSANZ recommendation, to use her statutory powers to require FSANZ to undertake a review and seek to have Monsanto provide new safety studies using the appropriate non-GM comparator.
