GMO-free news from France

24.10.2018 |

GMO – Are authorisations of sub-combinations legal?

In the EU, the risk assessment of GMOs is no longer systematically associated with the requirement to provide data. This is how the recent evolution in the field of GMOs could be summarised. After having described this evolution through emblematic applications for commercial authorisation, Inf’OGM focuses on this issue from a legal point of view.

Since 2013, commercial authorisations covering both a GMO with several transformation events (GMO ABC for example, called stacked GMO) and the GMOs combining the transformation events of the stacked GMO (GMOs AB, BC, and AC) have multiplied. However, Regulation 1829/2003 – on which most commercial authorisations are based – is silent on the question whether a single decision can authorise the commercialisation of several GMOs.

In 2013, the entry into force of Regulation 503/2013 put an end to this silence. The Regulation requires that “the applications for genetically modified food and feed from segregating crops [...] include all subcombinations independently of their origin and not yet authorised . This cleared the way for a preferential treatment of sub-combinations and for an exponential growth of the number of GMOs authorised in the European Union.

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