SUMMARY: Plant biotechnology companies work diligently to provide up-to-date technical information about their new products to Korea’s five regulatory agencies and the scientists who advise them. The CropLife Korea industry organization hosts in-depth workshops with international experts on important regulatory topics, while its extensive website houses scientific publications, news and other resources.
Korea is one of the world’s top importers of commodity grain, which is sourced from countries where agricultural biotechnology crops are grown extensively. Korea’s regulatory agencies must evaluate and approve new biotechnology traits and new combinations of traits before grain or any product that contains the traits can be imported. To be able to do this, the Korean regulatory agencies are challenged to stay well-informed about new technologies and assessment methodologies as they evolve.
CropLife Korea hosts in-depth workshops and supports an extensive website to help provide up-to-date information to regulators and interested parties.
Workshops
In selecting topics for the workshops they organize, CropLife Korea focuses on practical issues that impact the current regulatory approval system for biotechnology. Because the regulatory topics related to biotechnology crops are often very technical and complex, discussing them together with independent experts and academia is a good way to build understanding.
For example, in March 2011, CropLife Korea partnered with the Korean Rural Development Administration’s (RDA) Center for Genetically-Modified Crops to host a half-day workshop on “Globally harmonized risk assessment of biotech crops”, with an emphasis on food safety assessment.
The audience was made up of more than 50 attendees, including representatives from Korea’s five regulatory agencies. Several members of those agencies’ Evaluation Committees (drawn from academia and science institutes) and scientists working on government-funded biotechnology research projects also participated. Though all of the participants were highly-trained in their own fields, agricultural biotechnology is evolving quickly and the theories behind risk assessment were relatively new to many of them.
The topics were chosen based on real issues faced by the Korean Food and Drug Administration (KFDA), which is the lead agency for evaluating food and human health safety of crops produced with agricultural biotechnology. Session titles included ‘Evaluating the biological significance of natural differences’ and ‘The relationship of natural variation in cross-contamination.’
To facilitate clear understanding, all presentations were translated simultaneously, as were the question and answer periods. The participants welcomed this seminar as very useful for them and looked forward to future seminars on different topics.
Professor Bruce Chassy of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the United States, an expert on assessing the food safety of biotechnology crops, addressed technical subjects including the utility of whole food animal studies, the difference between statistical and biological significance, and future prospects of transgenic crops. Professor Chassy found attendees at the workshop to be very attentive and eager to learn in order to share with others, counter misinformation and address concerns about the use of biotechnology in agriculture. He summarized, “It’s really important to speak directly with people in order to understand their concerns. At the end of the day several attendees thanked me and told me that they had learned a great deal from the information presented and felt reassured.”
Similar workshops have taken place, while others are being planned for the future. Past events include the ILSI CERA Symposium on “The Environmental Risk: Assessment of Genetically Modified Plants in Low-Exposure Scenarios”, which included both Korean and Japanese regulators. In 2012, a workshop on evaluating the safety of crops with more than one previously-approved ‘stacked’ trait will be organized for Korean regulators and Evaluation Committee members.
Online information
Since not everyone is able to attend an expert technical workshop to learn about agricultural biotechnology, the CropLife Korea website (www.croplifekorea.org) was launched in 2009 in order to provide information more broadly and now attracts thousands of individual visitors every month. The website is accessible to any member of the general public, but particular care has been taken to ensure that the content of the website is useful for scientists, including those who serve in Korea’s regulatory agencies. The website, which is in Korean, contains two distinct sections. The first includes summaries of recent news and events about biotechnology and biosafety topics from a broad range of sources that may be of general interest. CropLife Korea staff members post material to this section as it is available, creating Korean-language summaries of the original articles if needed. They may add between 50 and 80 new articles per month, ensuring there is always up-to-date information available. Reports about the global area planted to biotech crops, regulatory decisions in the United States and Japan, and new products and advances by research institutes around the world are all included. The second section of the CropLife Korea website is more technically-oriented and contains scientific articles, research papers and conference proceedings that are published internationally on biosafety topics. When relevant publications become available, they are added to the site along with technical summaries in Korean. For example, a literature review from the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology on assessing the impact of biotech crop diets in animal feeding trials was summarized and posted to the site within weeks of its initial publication. Today, more than a dozen postings from peer-reviewed scientific journals, official symposia and regulatory reports are now online. Conclusion Science moves fast, but true knowledge in any topic is built over time, with multiple sources and experiences to draw upon. CropLife Korea’s workshops and online platforms are making important contributions to building the biosafety knowledge of Korean regulators, scientists and the public.