Biosafety policies in Turkiye and the evaluation of these policies for the relevant occupational groups

This thesis comparatively evaluates the biosafety policies of Turkiye and the EU, developed in the context of different approaches in the world, including the new gene editing techniques; and aims at determining the effects of the sociodemographic characteristics of food engineering, agricultural engineering, and veterinary medical professionals on their knowledge and confidence levels in these policies. In addition to findings obtained by literature review on the biosafety policies of various countries, especially the top five countries (USA, Brazil, Argentina, Canada, and India) in planting global transgenic crops, the EU, Turkiye, and international organizations, this thesis also presents findings from questionnaires with Likert type and ordinal scale-based expressions, applied to 261 individuals selected by the proportional sampling method from the Ankara province. The participants' sociodemographic characteristics and general GMO knowledge levels were determined by the frequency and percentage analyses. The dependency between certain expressions was analyzed with the chi-square and likelihood tests. The Mann-Whitney U and Kruskal-Wallis tests were used to determine the influence of the sociodemographic characteristics, which were first compared with the types of scores created by Exploratory Factor Analysis, then with each of the statements based on the ordinal scale, on the biosafety knowledge and trust level. The types of scores displaying differences were reported in this thesis. Despite specific differences in national and regional priorities, it has been observed that the biosafety policies of Turkiye and the EU are largely compatible. Furthermore, it was determined that the parameters related to age, gender, occupation, household type, education level, taking biotechnology or GMO courses, or participating in biotechnology training as a job requirement were influential on the biosafety knowledge and confidence levels of the professionals. Therefore, designing in-service training given the aforementioned sociodemographic parameters would improve the biosafety mechanism's reliability.