PURPOSE : to provide a framework for the traceability of GMOs and food and feed produced from GMOs, with the objective of facilitating accurate labelling, environmental monitoring and withdrawals of products.
CONTENT : this proposal concerns the traceability of GMOs, as defined under Directive 2001/18/EC, as or in products including seeds, as well as food and feed product produced from GMOs. It provides for legal certainty as well as a coherent and consistent approach that should contribute to the effective functioning of the internal market.
The proposal lays down the following requirements to ensure a harmonised framework for traceability of such products at all stages of their placing on the market:
- operators shall have in place systems and procedures to identify to whom and from whom products are made available;
- operators shall transmit specified information concerning the identity of a product in terms of the individual GMOs it contains or whether it is produced from GMOs;
- operators shall retain specified information for a period of five years and make it available to competent authorities on demand.
The proposal does not specify the means to transmit and retain this information given that existing systems to do so are already in place in many organisations.
The objectives for traceability of GMOs and products produced from GMOs are not identical and therefore the specified information to be transmitted and retained differs for each. This proposal provides for the traceability of individual GMOs within a product on the basis of authorised transformation events.
In addition, the proposal provides that the Commission shall establish a system to develop and assign simple numeric or alphanumeric unique codes to GMOs. Moreover, the proposal provides for the establishment of a system to develop and assign unique codes to GMOs.�