Risks of New GMOs: French Food Safety Agency ANSES Recommends Case-By-Case Assessment

Warns of dangers of unexpected toxins and allergens, nutritional problems.

An expert opinion on the risks of new GM plants from the French National Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health Safety (ANSES) has finally been published after delays led to repeated accusations of censorship (see below). Its devastating findings threaten to derail the attempts to weaken the regulations around new GM plants.

In the newly published report, ANSES calls for new GM plants to be assessed for health and environmental risks on a case-by-case basis. It says it is “important” to set up a monitoring plan after each market launch, both for the environmental impact of these new GMOs and their socio-economic effects.

The ANSES report’s authors carried out around ten case studies (rice with reduced height, wheat with lower gluten content, herbicide-tolerant potato, grapevine resistant to grey rot, tomato with high amino acid content, etc.) and considered the possible risks that these NGT plants (plants produced by new genomic techniques, like CRISPR/Cas) pose to health and the environment.

The group of scientists noted that “certain potential risks appear repeatedly in these case studies” and that “These include risks linked to unexpected changes in the composition of the plant, which could give rise to nutritional, allergenicity or toxicity problems, or medium- and long-term environmental risks, such as the risk of gene flow from edited plants to compatible wild or cultivated populations.”