UK calls for GM animal advisory body

The UK's Agriculture and Environment Biotechnology Commission (AEBC) has called for a new advisory body and development of a strategy to deal with issues relating to genetically modified and cloned animals.

In a report, Animals and Biotechnology, released last week, the commission said it was vital to consider the issues now, even though the use of GM and cloned animals in agriculture was still some way off.

The chairman of the AEBC, Cambridge University's Prof Malcolm Grant, said in a statement that developments in agriculture needed to be justifiable, and there should be a strong regulatory focus on GM and cloned animals, particularly with the level of public concern about the use of the technologies.

The recommendations made by the commission included:

• A new strategic advisory body to consider the development of GM animals - particularly farm animals.
• A review of the relevant animal welfare legislation on animals and new regulations in a number of areas.
• Independent scrutiny of how effectively existing farm animal welfare legislation is interpreted and enforced.
• A system for monitoring the progress of GM and cloned animals to look for unexpected health or welfare problems.
• No commercial development of GM fish in offshore fish farms while there remain significant uncertainties about the environmental impact of GM fish in the wild and keeping them contained in the fish farms.
• Monitoring the international movement of GM and cloned animals and reproductive material.

In particular, the AEBC emphasised that GM fish posed a significant potential environmental risk, and that more research needed to address this issue before commercial development took place.

But Dr Nic Bax from CSIRO Marine Research said that while there was a unquantified risk that escaped GM fish could gradually replace native fish stocks, there was no clear evidence that this would drive fish populations to extinction, as suggested by William Muir and Richard Howard of Purdue University in their "Trojan gene" theory.

He noted that the risks of GM animals were not easy to generalise and that each would have to be considered separately. But keeping fish from escaping commercial aquaculture facilities into the ocean was difficult, he said.

While scientists in Australia were using genetics to assist with breeding programs for fish and shellfish, Bax said that there were no plans he was aware of to create GM fish, except for the daughterless carp program being evaluated for control of carp in the Murray River system. He said that part of the reason for this was due to public hesitancy about GM foods.

The AEBC report comes on the heels of a number of other reports and recommendations examining GM and cloning technologies.

The US National Academies' of Science National Research Council released a report, Animal Biotechnology: Science Based Concerns, in late August which supported the Trojan gene theory, but also noted that there was no evidence that food from GM animals was unsafe to eat.

And Japan recently declared that it would allow human consumption of products from cloned animals.

Genetics Australia scientist Dr Ian Lewis, who is developing technologies for cloning and genetically modifying cows, said that as far as could be determined, products from cloned animals were equivalent to products from non-cloned animals.

"All evidence to date suggests that GM products are healthy and safe to eat," he said.

He noted that GM animals would be regulated by the Office of the Gene Technology Regulator (OGTR) and Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ), and said that high levels of scrutiny would help allay public fears.

In addition, he noted that GM livestock such as cows or sheep were easy to contain, and said that farmers maintained strict control of breeding stock. The presence of GM traits in livestock would also be easy to monitor.

"I think in the livestock industry, there will be a greater degree of containment," he said.