Letter to the Editor, Thursday January 21, 2016

Phony story

The self-serving media release by Federated Farmers' national president Dr William Rolleston (GMO questions for the Greens, Northland Age, January 19) is based on what is described by Australian Greens' leader Richard Di Natale as a phony story of division among the Greens on GMO policy, written by pro-GMO journalist Colin Bettles in the Australian Farmers' Weekly.

Bettles failed to report that the interview had been conducted months previously, before the Greens reviewed and reconfirmed existing GMO policy. The national daily The Australian also promoted its pro-GMO editorial policy by following the Bettles story. A subsequent Greens counter-statement went unreported by any media.

Richard Di Natale had been asked a couple of questions on GMOs in a wide-ranging interview several months prior to the recent Australian Greens' national conference. His unpublished rebuttal of the Bettles report made it very clear that the Greens had not changed their GMO policy, and stated that a high-evidence threshold must be met to demonstrate that there are not any negative impacts of GMOs before the Greens would consider supporting their use.

He said that the best evidence available indicated that GMOs had not yet been proven universally safe for the environment, agricultural systems or human health.

The evidence that worried him most was the risk GMOs posed to our natural environment, the increased use of herbicides that often accompanied GMO use, the contamination of neighbouring (non-GMO) crops and the lack of strong food labelling requirements to protect consumers' rights - not to mention the appalling behaviour of agri-giants like Monsanto.

In recent times, Green MPs have been very vocal about their concerns that regulators in Australia haven't been properly scrutinising new GMO technologies, and the party would continue to advocate for strong regulations of GMO use in that country.

The NZ Federated Farmers' media release is simply biased advocacy for GMOs, but that is to be expected when promoted by president Dr William Rolleston, who has been a long-time industry spokesman for so-called life sciences and is a director of several biotech-related companies, such as Transgenic Proteins NZ. He has also been on government-appointed research funding bodies. Conflict of interest maybe?

His statement that GMOs have been used extensively around the world, to the benefit of farmers and the environment, without any incident of harm is outrageous.

ROSS FORBES
Kerikeri