EFSA endeavours to develop networking and stronger cooperation with the Member States, and to strengthen its relationship with institutional partners (European Union and international) and stakeholders, as recommended by EFSA’s Management Board. In accordance with EFSA’s strategy for cooperating with Member States, the EFSA Scientific Network for Risk Assessment of GMOs (hereafter referred to as “the GMO Network”) was established in 2010. Since its inaugural meeting in November 2010, the GMO Network has met once per year.
The overall goals of the GMO Network are to improve dialogue among members, build mutual understanding of risk assessment principles, enhance knowledge and confidence in the scientific assessments carried out in the EU, and increase the transparency of the process among Member States and EFSA. It aims to raise the level of harmonisation of the risk assessments developed in the EU.
Currently 27 Member States and Norway are members of the GMO Network. Switzerland is invited to the GMO Network as observer. Each country was allowed to nominate two Member Organisations: one with competence in molecular characterisation and food-feed safety (MC/FF) and one with competence in environmental risk assessment (ERA). These Member Organisations have appointed in total over 60 selected scientific experts to attend the yearly meetings in the light of the topics on the agenda. A maximum of two experts per country are invited to each meeting.
The sixth meeting of the GMO Network, held in May 2015, was attended by 42 scientific experts from 25 Member States and Norway, one observer from Switzerland, two hearing experts invited as speakers, one representative of the European Commission (Directorate General for Health and Consumers – DG SANTE), five EFSA GMO Panel members, and 14 EFSA scientific staff members from the GMO and Evidence Management (DATA) Units.
At the sixth meeting of the GMO Network, the appointed experts were informed about follow-up activities to the discussions held at the fifth meeting of the GMO Network, active mandates of the EFSA GMO Panel, including GMO applications, risk assessment guideline development, requests for scientific advice, and procurement contracts. This was followed by discussions on the draft guidance on agronomic and phenotypic characterisation of GM plants and the draft guidance document for the risk assessment of the renewal of GM plant products authorized under Regulation (EC) No 1829/2003. Two breakout sessions were organised according to the expertise of the two groups of experts, to allow in-depth discussion of specific topics. The experts in the field of MC/FF discussed the use of EFSA Comprehensive European Food Consumption Database for estimating dietary exposure to GM foods. The experts in the ERA field discussed EFSA’s self-task activity to supplement its previous risk mitigation measures reducing exposure of non-target Lepidoptera to maize MON 810, Bt11 or 1507 pollen. At the following joint plenary session, the GMO Network experts discussed with the invited speakers risk assessment considerations for plants developed by new plant breeding techniques or synthetic biology, and for second generation GMOs respectively. This was followed by a discussion on the use of negative segregants in the comparative assessment of GMOs. EFSA also presented its Document Management System and shared information on upcoming scientific events.
In 2015, GMO Network experts participated in two EFSA meetings relevant for the risk assessment of GMOs. The first one was the 96th GMO Panel plenary meeting, which was held in Brussels on 4-5 March 2015. During this meeting, the draft guidance document on agronomic and phenotypic characterisation of GM plants and the draft guidance for the risk assessment of the renewal of GM plant products authorised under Regulation (EC) No 1829/2003 were discussed. GMO Network members expressed their views and asked questions related to these draft documents, in their quality as observers to this meeting. The second one was the ‘Workshop on allergenicity assessment of GM plants’, held in the context of guidance development in Brussels, on 17 June 2015. The objective of this workshop was to involve stakeholders at an early stage of the guidance development and to enhance their participation in EFSA scientific work. GMO Network members actively participated to the discussions held at this workshop and provided valuable input.
