Japan Biotech Regulators Visit U.S., Experience Value Chain

In cooperation with the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, the U.S. Grains Council (USGC) recently organized a team of Japanese regulators involved in the food, feed and environmental approvals of biotech corn events in Japan to travel to the United States.

While stateside, the group met with Council staff, U.S. government regulators, biotech seed companies and industry organizations, and U.S. corn producers and companies involved in the production, distribution and exports of U.S. corn to Japan.

The meetings helped educate the regulators about biotech corn events in the pipeline for entry into the Japanese regulatory system in the future and to see how regulatory approvals and regulations need to be able to work with the U.S. corn production, distribution and exports systems. Additionally, the team learned how U.S. regulators and the biotech industry have addressed unintentional low-level presence of unapproved events in commercial corn supply to incorporate practical solutions if such incidents were to happen, keeping U.S.-to-Japan corn trade open and functioning.

“The Council has been organizing the biotech team every year since 2007,” said Tommy Hamamoto, USGC director in Japan. “The knowledge and confidence the regulators have acquired from the past trips contributed to making and maintaining their science-based regulatory decisions, such as the elimination of certain field trial requirements.

“Now the development of plant innovation products has additional significance to the team visit, making their decisions on these products reasonable through discussions between their counterparts in the U.S. biotech regulatory agencies.”

Through this mission, the Council’s goal was that Japanese regulators gained a better understanding of U.S. biotech regulations, future biotech events and how their regulations should work to allow for smooth trade from the U.S. to Japan.

“The biotech regulator team is a team we were happy to have return to the United States,” said Jack Custard, USGC manager of global programs. “We hope to have this team continue to come back to see us, hear stories from our members about biotechnology, and learn about new innovations coming in the future.”