Court overturns anti-GE block

A rare victory for New Zealand opponents of genetic engineering was today overturned when the Court of Appeal lifted a High Court ban on environmental regulators considering four very broad applications made last year by AgResearch.

The High Court at Wellington last year ruled that the Environmental Risk Management Authority (Erma) stop assessing Agresearch's applications for laboratory testing of human and monkey cell lines and smaller species of GE laboratory animals, and the development of GE cows, buffalo, sheep, pigs, goats, llamas, alpacas, deer and horses.

The state science company wanted that livestock to produce antigens, biopharmaceuticals, enzymes, hormones and other products with possible health benefits and commercial applications.

But the High Court agreed with GE Free New Zealand that the applications were too general, and effectively stopped Erma from making detailed assessments.

"The error is such that Erma cannot continue to treat the applications as if they were valid," Justice Denis Clifford said in June last year when directing Erma to take no further steps toward hearing them.

Today, three Appeal Court judges quashed his ruling.

Justice Mark O'Regan said the Appeal Court regarded Erma's decision to accept and register genetic engineering applications as "essentially mechanical". It was not sufficiently important to warrant orders in a judicial review.

"Erma should continue its process of assessment," he said.

Acceptance of the applications "does not involve any kind of seal of approval".

Erma could still ultimately dismiss an application because its generic nature did not make it capable of approval, "or perhaps more likely, its generic nature means that the quantification of risks and benefits is so uncertain as to leave Erma unsatisfied".

Justice O'Regan said there was no doubt the generic nature of the application provided particular challenges to Erma "but we do not think it would be helpful for this court to attempt any guidance at this stage of the Erma process".

Justice O'Regan said GE Free's case was responsibly advanced, raising issues of significance, and he made no order for costs.

Agresearch wants to import small animals, and micro-oganisms, and use cell-lines from them as research models for livestock.

Eventually it wants to make the same genetic changes in livestock such as cattle, sheep and goats, and use them to produce GE milk from which engineered proteins can be refined, or exported.

Earlier this year, Agresearch asked regulators to roll over its existing approvals for GE cattle and add in goats and sheep as well, while it waited on the legal row over the four generic applications. It wanted to continue work done by a partner company in GE goats in the United States, which could boost its own efforts to produce pharmaceuticals in cows' milk.

AgResearch has raised GE cows for about nine years at a site at Ruakura near Hamilton. Some of the cows have a human gene that allows them to produce milk with a human protein that can be extracted for use in pharmaceutical trials.

It has said that GE livestock could create cost-efficient therapeutic proteins which could be extracted from the animals' milk, cheaper than through traditional cell culture systems producing drugs such as Herceptin.

Taxpayers have so far invested over $12 million in the AgResearch GE work over the past decade, and the Government has committed to invest another $8 million over the next five years.

International companies which have set up operations in association with AgResearch include GTC Biotherapeutics (USA) and Pharming NV (Netherlands).

- NZPA