Biosafety Clearing-House

The Biosafety Clearing-House is an international mechanism that exchanges information about the movement of genetically modified organisms, established under the .

The Biosafety Clearing-House (BCH) is an information-exchange mechanism established by the to assist Parties to implement its provisions and to facilitate sharing of information on, and experience with, living modified organisms (also known as GMOs). The Biosafety Clearing-House Central Portal is accessible through the Web.

The BCH assists Parties (i.e. governments that have ratified the Protocol) and other stakeholders to make informed decisions regarding the importation or release of living modified organisms. The BCH is a distributed system, and information in it is owned and updated by the users themselves through an authenticated system to ensure timeliness and accuracy.

Article 20, paragraph 1 of the established the BCH as part of the clearing-house mechanism of the Convention on Biological Diversity, in order to:

(a) Facilitate the exchange of scientific, technical, environmental and legal information on, and experience with, living modified organisms; and (b) Assist Parties to implement the Protocol, taking into account the special needs of developing country Parties, in particular the least developed and small island developing States among them, and countries with economies in transition as well as countries that are centres of origin and centres of genetic diversity.

The Biosafety Clearing-House is designed to be interoperable with other databases, so governments may register their information with the central Biosafety Clearing-House database, or with another (interoperable) database of their choice. The location of the information makes no difference to the user, who is able to retrieve all information through the Central Portal of the Biosafety Clearing-House.

To date, a number of relevant databases have been identified and are interoperable with the Central Portal, including national sites such as the United States Regulatory Agencies Unified Biotechnology Website and the Swiss Biosafety Clearing-House, and international databases such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) unique identification database, the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB) biosafety publications database and The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) GM Foods Platform.

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