The concept of substantial equivalence has been accepted as the cornerstone of the assessment of GM foods at OECD in 1993, but would you tell me how OECD came to this conclusion? I want to know what concepts were also discussed and the reason they decided to use substantial equivalence. If we can explain the denied concepts, we can paradoxically convince the consumer to use the substantial equivalence.

Expert response from Community Manager

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Friday, 09/10/2015 11:42

Substantial equivalence is used as part of GM food safety assessments because of its methodological advantages, and because of its long time use in evaluating new technologies. The review of medical devices is one example of how substantial equivalence is used.

In this response, we share an article from Marianna Schauzu, who formerly worked with the BgVV Federal Institute for Health Protection of Consumers and Veterinary Medicine in Berlin when it was published in 2000. According to the article:

“The term ‘substantial equivalence’ has been introduced into the concept of safety assessment of novel foods only recently, but the underlying strategy of comparing newly developed products or techniques to existing ones has been applied for a long time – not only in agriculture, but in many other fields of science and technology when new developments were introduced.”

This report from Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy provides an in-depth overview of how substantial equivalence became part of GM crop food safety assessments, including reporting recommendations from the OECD's Group of National Experts on Safety in Biotechnology working group. Here is an excerpt:

"An important rationale for developing this approach to the safety assessment of GM foods was that in contrast to many compounds such as pesticides, pharmaceuticals, industrial chemicals and food additives, whole (GM) foods are complex mixtures of compounds characterised by a wide variation in composition and nutritional values. To the opinion of the OECD working group, there were serious practical and methodological difficulties of obtaining meaningful information from conventional toxicology studies on the safety of whole foods. These difficulties had for example also become apparent when animal feeding studies had been used to assess the safety of irradiated foods."

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