Regulatory Oversight and Safety Assessment of Plants with Novel Traits

Because plants are a fundamental constituent of the human diet, either as a direct source of nutrients, or indirectly as feed for animals, scientific and technical advances in agriculture have played a crucial role in ensuring food security, in meeting feedstock demands, and in providing various benefits to society at large. Over the past few centuries, techno-scientific progress in agriculture has improved the reliability and quality of the world food and feed supply, allowing fewer farmers to feedmore andmore people, with less labour. The whole package of genetically improved plants, irrigation, fertilisers, pesticides and tillage operations has revolutionised agriculture. Throughout the history of plant breeding, various plant breeding techniques have been used to develop and select new gene combinations for improving the performance of plants (Moose and Mumm 2008). Initially, wild plants with useful characteristics were gathered and cultivated. In this domestication process, preferential characteristics observed in phenotypes of wild plant individuals or spontaneous variants were selected and reproduced. This gradual evolution allowed former foragers to increasingly control when, where, and in what quantities food plants were grown, rather than to depend upon vagaries of nature. This evolution went together with the adoption of more sedentary lifestyles. Through the selection of observable phenotypes, farmers and plant breeders have been modifying the underlying genotype of plants to adapt them to human needs (e.g., more favourable characteristics in terms of yield and agronomic,