ISF has always supported the development of genetic engineering as an additional tool at the disposal of plant breeders. Several position papers, available on ISF website, relate to this subject. Four main areas need to be considered:

• The assessment of environmental and food safety.
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  Even if the scientific principles for assessing the environmental and food safety of new genetically engineered plant varieties are quite similar from country to country, the political approach may be extremely different, and sometimes there are even official or de facto moratorium on transgenic crops in some countries. This of course creates difficulties in the trade, preventing the export of some varieties in some countries having nevertheless similar growing conditions, requiring companies to duplicate very expensive and cumbersome procedures. ISF is working at the harmonization of procedures, the lift of the moratorium and the mutual acceptance of data and results.

  The recent adoption of the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety on January 29, 2002 and its ratification, likely to occur in the coming months, will also impose new rules:

• An advanced informed agreement should be obtained from the importing country prior to the first intentional shipment
• The documentation accompanying the transgenic variety shall clearly identify it as an LMO (living modified organism). The form on how to give this information is not yet decided and ISF advocates for the use of existing commercial documents.

• The adventitious presence of GM material in non-GM seed.
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  This issue, consequence of the large development of GMO in countries where several traits have been approved (more than 53 million hectares were grown to GMO in 2001) is much more worrying than the previous one. Indeed, even if cumbersome and costly, it is possible to manage the deliberate release of GMO in the environment. On the contrary, there is no practical solution to prevent adventitious presence of GM material in non-GM seed with a probability of 100%, in countries where GMO are grown on a commercial basis or in trials. Even in countries where, at the moment, there is no commercial development of GMO and very few, if any, experiment, like France, trace of GM traits are found in seed lots.

  As early as 1999, ISF has drawn the attention of governments and international organizations to that difficult issue, asking them to fix practical thresholds for adventitious presence of approved events in all the countries member of the OECD seed schemes. Unfortunately, no agreement has been reached at the moment, either at international or even, in most cases, at national level. This has caused, since 2000, severe disruption of trade, in particular between North America and Europe, on crops such as oilseed rape, cotton and maize. If no solution is found soon, it could become a veritable nightmare, putting at risk the international seed trade. The uncertainty on international environment liability, still under discussion at CBD and Cartagena Protocol levels, is making the situation even worse. Of course ISF, in cooperation with allied industries, will continue to follow carefully the development in that area, in order to help finding workable solutions. But it is essential that each national association be active at their governmental level.