POLICY AND PRACTICE REVIEWS article
Front. Bioeng. Biotechnol.
Sec. Biosafety and Biosecurity
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fbioe.2025.1619857
This article is part of the Research TopicThe Future of Agricultural Biosafety RegulationsView all 10 articles
One Risk Assessment for Genetically Modified Plants
Provisionally accepted- J.R. Simplot Company, Boise, Idaho, United States
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With over 30 years' experience conducting risk assessments for genetically modified (GM) plants, regulatory agencies that review the safety of GM plants understand the potential food, feed, and environmental risks associated with these products. This vast regulatory experience is underutilized when risk assessments for GM plants are repeated on a per-country basis. The redundancy in country-by-country reviews of the same GM plants places a disproportionate regulatory burden on developers and strains limited government resources for conducting safety reviews. Requiring repeated, multi-country risk assessments to obtain food and feed import permits or cultivation permits for GM plants is unnecessary as repeated assessments do not demonstrate or change the safety and associated risks of already approved products. To avoid redundancies in the regulation GM plants, we propose adoption of one, global risk assessment for food, feed, and environmental release carried out to international standards. Our proposed model for one global risk assessment encourages the sharing of food, feed and environmental risk assessment summaries between countries while maintaining national approvals for GM plants. Steps towards a streamlined and efficient review process for GM plants are discussed, including implementing a global, forward-looking approval process that eliminates repetitive risk assessments and re-reviews of low-risk traits. Harmonization of risk assessment is an achievable goal that would accelerate regulatory approvals and enable broader access to the benefits of GM plants which are currently only available to some countries.
Keywords: GMO, Low risk, Regulatory efficiency, RNA Interference, vegetative crops, cisgenes
Received: 28 Apr 2025; Accepted: 08 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Koch, DeMond, Pence, Schaefer and Rudgers. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Muffy Koch, J.R. Simplot Company, Boise, Idaho, United States
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.