The NAS would form a committee of 15 members to examine the environmental impacts of GM plants and to provide guidance on how to assess and mitigate risks. Risk tests aim to calculate the chance of an event to occur in a given set of circumstances. It is an important aid to the decision-making process in cases where the likelihood of an event to occur is very small but such occurrence would result in catastrophic effects. One of the best examples is the risk analysis of the possibility of a meltdown of a nuclear power station, where the chances for it to occur are small but if one does occur, an entire region can be destroyed. In the case of GM crops, although their pollen can reach well beyond the plantation, the chance of pollen from a GM crop to pollinate a non-GM crop nearby is very small.
Pollen grains have to overcome a series of difficulties for a successful fertilisation to occur.
However, in the assumption that pollen from GM crops not only escape to adjacent fields but succeed in pollinating a few plants, the most horrid outcome is that the plants generated from the intrusive pollen can not, according to arbitrary regulations, be classified as 'organic'. In traditional genetic manipulation, an activity known as plant breeding, pollination is carried out manually by a plant breeder, and may take many years to create a new variety. Although all organisms use the same genetic mechanism, DNA, nature has devised physiological, anatomical and molecular barriers to prevent hybridisation in order to preserve genomes that are already adapted. Thus, plant breeders can only cross individuals of the same species or between species that are closely related. In cultures that reproduce asexually, like the potato, the genes are maintained unchanged and the interspecific crossing with wild relatives were carried out to increase the crop's genetic variability regarding pest resistance.