the process or techniques through which these changes were induced. This resulting product should, therefore, be the trigger and subject of regulation, i.e. risk management practices, and the regulatory requirements should be proportional to the possible risks it poses.
- South Africa has a robust and experienced regulatory system for GMOs, which can without much change be applied to also effectively regulate the products of these new techniques and, in fact, any genome modifying techniques that may still be developed in the future. The key for allowing this is that the GMO Act (Act15 of 1997), as it stands, has a product-based trigger sets genetic variation beyond that which may also occur naturally as the threshold for regulation.
The report is available on www.assaf.org.za.
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Grassroots
August 2017
Vol. 17, No.3