Dear Participants,
I have been thinking about the questions of the Forum and discussed them with the colleagues in the GMO office. As we understand the aim of this Roadmap is supplementation of Annex III of the Protocol: «The Roadmap is intended to facilitate and enhance the effective use of Annex III by elaborating on the steps and points to consider in environmental risk assessment and by pointing users to relevant background materials». Therefore, we agree with Geoff Ridley's opinion and believe that with the individual approach to each type of LMOs pointed in the Annex III the Road map is a tool to assist conducting a risk assessment. This, of course, a generic set of actions, but they will always be complemented with the development of knowledge about LMOs and their environmental effects. We believe that the national biosafety policies and legislations are the main controlling tools of the Roadmap.
We think, that the more important thing in this context is the development of appropriate tools to analyze LMOs risks for specific types of LMOs and traits and for the Monitoring procedure (the Guidance, Part II, III), which, in our opinion, can be achieved only by continuously updating Database (Background materials linked to the Guidance on Risk Assessment of Living Modified Organisms) with the appropriate analysis techniques, development of the tools their degree of applicability assessment, competent experts' selection of the methods of analysis (individual tests) and their sorting in the Database for convenience when looking for experts in risk assessment or research planning and conducting risk assessment.

Galina Mozgova,
The National Coordination Biosafety Centre of the Republic of Belarus