ISAAA News - September 9, 2020

Figure: Dr. Lisa Kelly of the Food Standards Australia and New Zealand.

ISAAA together with partners, facilitates discourses on animal biotechnology regulations as it hosts the 4^th International Workshop on Regulatory Approaches for Animal Biotechnology. The workshop aims to exchange information, share experiences, and enhance cooperation towards animal biotechnology regulations among countries who are either working on or implementing their respective guidelines.

The workshop is divided into four sessions, with the first session held on September 8-9, 2020. The first session, attended by 273 individuals via Zoom, covered CODEX guidelines for the conduct of food safety assessments of foods derived from rDNA animals which was presented by Dr. Lisa Kelly of the Food Standards Australia and New Zealand, and individual animal biosafety regulation updates from Argentina, Brazil, Australia and New Zealand, the Philippines, Canada, the United States, and the African Union. The discussions for the second day of the first session will include food safety measures for conventional animals. The succeeding sessions will be held on September 23-24, 2020 to explore genome editing regulatory approaches, and on October 7-8, 2020 to tackle environmental safety aspects of regulations for genetically engineered animals for confined use and environmental release. The last leg of the online workshop will be held on October 19-22, 2020, wherein breakout sessions will be conducted to synthesize all the key points raised during Sessions 1-3.

The online workshop is a prelude to an in-person event of the same title that will be held in 2021. The co-organizers of the workshop include the United States Department of Agriculture, Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture, and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

Interested parties can contact mkarembu@isaaa.org to know more about the succeeding online sessions of the workshop.