With the advent of crop genetic engineering in the 1980s, public controversy and intense public scrutiny over genetically modified (GM) foods meant that the trial and error method of discovering whether new GM foods were safe became unacceptable. Scientific safety assessment of new GM foods as well as government regulation of their introduction was introduced in many countries.
In Australia, this occurred during the major policy reform of all Australian food safety regulation, through the revision of the national Food Standards Code (1994-2002). During this period, safety assessment of GM foods became the responsibility of Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ). Section 1.5.2 of the Food Standards Code defines the requirements for the compulsory pre-market assessment and labelling of foods produced by gene technology.
Relative safety of GM foods is assessed by systematically looking for all the chemical differences that can be found between:
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- a GM food and
- an otherwise comparable non-GM food that can be presumed to be already safe because of its history of safe use.
If no meaningful differences are detectable in a new crop variety, the GM food can be assumed to be at least as safe as its non-GM counterpart.
Read the full original article: Setting the standards: who regulates Australian GM food?
