Team:UChile OpenBio-CeBiB/Collaborations/iGEMManchesterCollaboration
GMO Regulations
Here is the collaboration organized by iGEM Manchester team. They made a series of questions about regulations for the correct manipulation of GMOs, and different teams have answered them, depending on which country they are from.
The institutional bodies that enforce the laws regarding the use of GMMs differ a lot across the world. In many countries in Asia (Japan, Indonesia, and Korea) and Canada, ministries and departments are responsible for enforcing the laws of GMMs. The kinds of ministries enforcing the laws as well as their numbers vary from country to country, but usually the large organizations are in charge.
On the other hand, countries like India, Brazil, the United States, and Australia have more specialied committees or institutions of biotechnology and biosafety and these committees are responsible for enforcing the laws.
In the European Union, the European Commission is responsible for enforcing the GMO laws to be followed by all member countries. Chile doesn’t have a clear regulation for biotechnology, but has responsible institutions when commercing or trading.
We can distinguish two different administrative ways in which countries decided to regulate the use of GMMs. One way government regulate GMMs is by establishing a special, often non-governmental, organisation, which usually also acts as an information centre in the field of synthetic biology. The other way involves assigning conventional ministries to regulate the use of GMMs in their respective fields.
The European Union, Australia, and Indonesia belong to the first group. For example, in Australia, Gene Technology Regulator Advisory Committee takes charge of making decisions on products’ approval. Competent authorities in the European Union and The Biosafety Commission and The Technical Team for Biosafety in Indonesia have similar roles.
Brazil, Canada, Chile, Korea, India, Japan and the US belong to the second group, where conventional ministries are responsible for their respective fields. Even though the names of these ministries might differ amongst the countries, it seems to be a more prevalent way to regulate GMO. Additional information centres might be present to help the ministries make decisions, nonetheless.
The legal requirements in the European Union, Australia, Brazil, Japan, Indonesia and India are very similar. All uses of GMOs require risk assessments to be run before the start of the production. The exact procedures related to obtaining permissions to use GMOs in the production vary, however, according to the target use of the final products or the way the GMOs are handled in the production process. As a general rule, products related to human health as well as those used as food or feed have to follow stricter GMO procedures, such as obtaining approvals from several ministries or labelling your final products in a predescribed manner. Environmental release of GMOs is also given serious attention although the procedures are not as tight, just as in the case of contained GMO use. Usually, the target use also dictates which Ministry will be responsible for the evaluation and approval of the planned GMO use. These could include Ministries of Agriculture, Health, Food, Fisheries, Forestry, Environment and many more.
In Korea, the procedure is also similar but it requires a payment of a examination fee that costs 4000 dollars. In the USA, GMO plants are considered equivalent to non-GMO plants and do not require much further approval; only if the plant express a protein that is significantly different from any protein originally expressed, will a respective institution be required to approve of such use. In Chile, on the other hand, it is forbidden to commercialise GMOs as only seed exportation is allowed.
