Edible safety requirements and assessment standards for agricultural genetically modified organisms

This paper describes the background, principles, concepts and methods of framing the technical regulation for edible safety requirement and assessment of agricultural genetically modified organisms (agri-GMOs) for Shenzhen Special Economic Zone in the People’s Republic of China. It provides a set of systematic criteria for edible safety requirements and the assessment process for agri-GMOs. First, focusing on the degree of risk and impact of different agri-GMOs, we developed hazard grades for toxicity, allergenicity, anti-nutrition effects, and unintended effects and standards for the impact type of genetic manipulation. Second, for assessing edible safety, we developed indexes and standards for different hazard grades of recipient organisms, for the influence of types of genetic manipulation and hazard grades of agri-GMOs. To evaluate the applicability of these criteria and their congruency with other safety assessment systems for GMOs applied by related organizations all over the world, we selected some agri-GMOs (soybean, maize, potato, capsicum and yeast) as cases to put through our new assessment system, and compared our results with the previous assessments. It turned out that the result of each of the cases was congruent with the original assessment.