On 10 Jun 2014, MoA issued a circular to all provincial agricultural bureaus to strengthen the supervision on Agricultural GMOs. The Ministry acknowledged that activities involving GMO’s are “controllable nationwide.” Regulatory breaches do occur from time to time which arouse public concern over China’s governance on Agricultural GMOs.
The circular stipulates that all provincial bureaus should investigate GMO involved research institutions, educational organizations and enterprise within their administration area. Any organization or enterprise which is engaged in research, production, processing and marketing of agricultural GMOs should be overseen by the authorities. Once an irregularity is found, it should be dealt with immediately and reported to the competent authorities at a higher level.
The field trial of agricultural GMOs should be supervised under the “Guidance for the Safety Inspection on Field Trial of Agricultural GMOs”. The competent authority should supervise the whole cultivation process and make sure that the harvest and GMO waste products are handled properly.
Before conducting the field testing, the provincial bureau should report the experiment to the MoA. If the experiment was not reported, the experiment should be suspended and a rectification ordered within a time limit. The pilot study should be conducted in the test site under controlled conditions while the environment release and experiment should be conducted under prescribed experimental conditions;
Research institutions are not permitted to transfer GMO materials between each other;
GMO’s without safety certificates should not undergo regional trials or apply for crop variety examination and approval. MoA warns that GMO varieties must undergo GMO specific regulatory measures and not those designated for non-GMO crops. The authority will increase the regional testing of rice, maize, rape seed and soybean. If GMO ingredients are detected, the experiment will be terminated. The MoA will take such irregularities extremely seriously;
The GMOs and GMO product should be clearly labelled;
China has not yet approved the plantation of any kind GMO grains crop and has a zero-tolerance policy on the labeling of certain kinds of agricultural GMOs. However, GMO ingredients were found in the rice exported to Europe and also in domestic produce. At the end of last year, Hainan Agricultural Bureau tested 107 samples and found 15 of them were GMOs. The GMOs were from 13 research institutes most of which were state owned institutes or educational institutions, which included China National Seed Group, China Agricultural University, the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and Huazhong Agricultural University. Last year Green Peace found that some of the GMOs were grown just 10 meters away from the non-GMO planting field which poses a serious risk of genetic transfer.
