Based on our presentation on behalf of IFPRI at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Technical Conference on the Low Levels of Genetically Modified Crops in International Food and Feed Trade held March 20-21, 2014 in Rome, Italy and based on responses from different stakeholders, we felt necessary to share not only the presentation but also our comments to the slides and additional information about the presentation.

As I have started explaining earlier, studies conducted on the impact of LLP policies deal with a quite complex issue that requires extensive data for impacts. This task is complicated by data issues, in particular having reliable data on prices, trade volumes, shares and of testing costs is a limiting factor.

Research done in this area tends to use relatively -and at the same time deceptively- simple models and use multiple assumptions about data and model structure. This is born out of necessity as the need exists not only to identify the potential outcome, but also to define how relevant variables may influence the impact outcome. Extensive sensitivity analysis are routinely conducted to examine the potential variability in outcomes and how sensitive results are to assumptions.