Harmonisation of regulatory oversight of transgenic plants does not mean th
at all regulatory agencies must have identical legislation, information req
uirements, assessment processes and resulting decisions. Rather, it means t
hat they seek to build consensus on the science that they use to assess the
safety of the release of transgenic plants. Even though there may be diffe
rences in the outcomes of biosafety assessments because of the different en
vironments into which transgenic plants may be released, there is recogniti
on that much information (data) already available are relevant to transgeni
c plant biosafety assessment. The Organisation of Economic Cooperation Memb
er countries, through the development of Consensus Documents, present this
knowledge in a format that can expedite the safety assessment of transgenic
plants. These documents can be considered as "mutual recognition of data,"
and are a means of moving towards harmonised regulatory decision making. T
o date the OECD Member countries are working on types types of Consensus Do
cument: plant species biologies which focus specifically on centres of orig
in and diversity, and on related plant species with which that species can
hybridise; general trait documents which focus on scientific issues arising
from the development of such general traits as coat protein mediated virus
resistance; and, specific trait documents which focus on the characteristi
cs of specific genes and the resulting gene products that confer the novel
trait to the transgenic plant.