Benefits the path to GM ingredient acceptance?
ingredients in their recipes as long as consumer sceptism towards
biotech foodstuffs continues but at a meeting herded by Europe's
food agency this week attendees hear that finding the balance
between risk and benefits could be the path to acceptance.
Over 350 participants gathered in Berlin on Monday under the aegis of the European Food Safety Authority take part in a dialogue, the first public event on the subject, relating to future perspectives in European risk assessment regarding food and feed safety.
One speaker, Professor Maxime Schwartz from the French food agency, Agence française de sécurité sanitaire des aliments, underlined that the consumer does not see genetically modified organisms in terms of a benefit/risk ratio but only in terms of risks.
"Technological advancement involves risks, irrespective of whether these risks are low or high. They are only acceptable to the population if the technological advance brings benefits," Professor Schwartz told attendees.
But she cautions that in the case of transgenic plants, the most widely known examples of GMOs 'only the risks are highlighted, without enough questions being asked about the benefits'.
In order to tackle the imbalance, Professor Schwartz proposes that an assessment of the health benefits of GMOs could be conducted at the same time as a risk assessment.
"We would thus tend, for these new foods, towards an analysis of the benefit/risk ratio, comparable to that prevailing prior to marketing of a drug," said the professor.
GM ingredients are regarded with some suspicion by consumers in Europe and as such are used infrequently in food formulations by food manufacturers anxious for buoyant, not falling, sales. But Brussels recently pushed through tough new rules on the labelling of GM ingredients - that flag up such an ingredient on the food label - in a bid to make such foodstuffs more accessible to the market.
