Legal Control On The Safety Of Genetically Modified Organisms In China

With the rapid development of modern biotechnology, the GMOs of different function are constantly emerging, and brought to mankind great economic benefits. However, due to the uncertainty of biotechnology, GMOs have presented new challenges on human health, ecological environment, biological diversity, and social ethics. Since people have different understanding of the potential risks of GMOs, so the safety of GMOs has become a hot topic all over the world, which aroused the international community's attention. To achieve the purpose and avoiding disadvantages, many countries and international organizations actively work on legal research, and provide a number of laws and regulations for the safety of the GMOs. Based on the different understanding and needs of the safety of GMOs, different countries and regions take different approaches to GMOs, which can be roughly summed up as the relaxed mode represented by the United States, the strict model represented by the European Union and the compromise mode represented by Japan.Over the years, China has made great achievements in the development and application of GMOs, On account of our attention on modern biotechnologys.On the safety of GMOs and their product, China has formulated a series of laws and management system suited to national conditions, which meet the needs of the legislation department in a certain extent. But in recent years, China is continuouly involved in the cases and disputes of GMOs, such as Nestle mark dispute and commercial cultivation of GM rice controversy. All these indicate that there are serious deficiencies in China's existing laws and institutions. Domestic scholars have begun to realize the importance of this issue, and have carried out extensive research on the safety of GMOs. In order to keep up with our country's current development of GMOs, China should learn the experience of legal control on the safety of GMOs from foreign countries. In view to the domestic situation of legal control on the safety of GMOs, China should adopt strict compromise model to improve the legal control on the safety of GMOs, respectively from the legal system and management mechanism.