The safety Certificate for agricultural GMOs is valid for five years and the renewal application should be filed 1 year before the expiration date;
If the safety certificate is expired, the GM crop should go through the same review process as new GMOs, which will take at least two years;
Most of the applications for imported transgenic soybean, maize were filed by MNCs;
With the expiration of the safety certificate, GM seeds cannot be sold in China
The remaining Agricultural GMO safety certificates of food crop, the Cry1Ab/Cry1Ac, the Bt63 and phytase enzyme maize were all expired on the 17th Aug 2014. As the safety certificates were not renewed in time, at this stage there can be no further commercialization of these GMOs in China.
Both the Cry1Ab/Cry1Ac and the Bt63 were developed by the Huazhong Agricultural University (HZAU), which were all inserted with BT gene. MoA received the applications for the safety assessment in 1999 and the issued the safety certificate for agricultural GMOs on 17 Aug 2009. According to the “Regulation on the Safety Control of Agricultural Genetically Modified Organism (State Council Decree 304)” and other supporting measures from the MoA, the safety certificate is valid for five years and the renewal application should be filed 1 year before the expiration date. If the safety certificate is expired, the GM crop must go through the same review process as for new GMOs, which will take at least two years. Huanzhong Agricultural University has not yet disclosed the renewal progress of the safety certificate of its GM rice.
China issues two types of safety certificate for agricultural GMOs: One if for agricultural production (commercial plantation) and the other is for processing material. Totally 7 crops have approved for plantation and at this stage most of the safety certificates are already expired (see Agro Analysis on 10 Mar 2014). The approvals of processing material were generally for imported transgenic soybean, maize and rapeseed for feeds and oil processing purposes. These materials were widely cultivated in GMO planting regions and applications were generally filed by MNCs such as Monsanto, Syngenta and DuPont Pioneer (see ChemLinked News Release on 17 Jul 2014). If a GMO food crop is already issued with a safety certificate and is to be cultivated in China, it should further go through the seed management system. This system which was established under China’s Seed Law which stipulates that depending on the activities involved in the seed business, a GM food crop should obtain different certificates and licenses:
Activity/Role | Approval | Certificate/license |
Developer, owner of the GMO | Crop Variety Examination and Approving | Crop Variety Approval Certificate |
Seed production | Seed production Approval | Seed Production License |
Seed Marketing | Seed Marketing approval | Seed Marketing License |
Production GM food; Processing GM crop | Production and Processing Approval | Production and Processing of agricultural GMOs |
With the expiry of a safety certificate, seeds cannot be commercially sold in China. However, the Bt63 rice is frequently detected in the market. Last year, EU reported 25 incidents of GM contamination in rice imported from China most of which was Bt63. Several months ago, CCTV’s reporter sampled 5 batched of rice from the supermarket and found three of them contaminated with Bt63. It was also reported that Bt63 was marketed as in Wuhan, headquarters of HZAU. Many rice growers admitted that they prefer to grow GM rice as they don’t need to buy insecticides and hire people for the spraying, which was much more cost-effective than traditional seeds.
