ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON RELEASES TO THE ENVIRONMENT Report 1: Towards an evidence-based regulatory system for GMOs

The Advisory Committee of Releases into the Environment (ACRE) is an independent advisory committee composed of leading scientists and technical experts. Our main function is to give statutory advice to UK ministers and ministers in the Devolved Administrations on the risks to human health and the environment posed by the release and marketing of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). This report is one of three in which we consider the regulatory framework in which we operate. We first registered concern about fundamental principles of the legislation in our 2007 report: „Managing the Footprint of Agriculture: Towards a Comparative Assessment of Risks and Benefits for Novel Agricultural Systems‟. This report was designed to place the advice we issued on the UK‟s farm-scale trials of herbicide-tolerant crops into a wider context; it highlighted inconsistencies in the approach to GMO regulation. Our latest reports reflect our concern that the operation of this regulatory system is becoming increasingly untenable.