Documents revealed under Freedom of Information laws show that the Office of the Gene Technology Regulator (OGTR) has been colluding with industry for years to deregulate a range of new genetic modification (GM) techniques. And now the rest of us have just 6 weeks to make the case why they should be regulated!
If the OGTR deregulates these new GM techniques there will be no monitoring or surveillance. Anyone from amateur biohackers – to industry – to terror groups would be free to use them to genetically modify plants, animals and microbes. Entirely new diseases and poisons could be made. And they could enter our food chain and our environment with no safety testing and no labelling. The risks could be catastrophic.
Reviews commissioned by the Austrian and Norwegian governments concluded that not enough is known about the risks posed by these new GM techniques. They recommended that products derived from them require comprehensive case-by-case risk assessments.
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