Government out for ice royalties

By SIMON COLLINS science reporter

A Government agency is looking at taking a cut of any profits made from "bioprospecting" in the New Zealand-controlled part of Antarctica.

A discussion paper produced by Antarctica New Zealand last October, obtained by a lobbyist under the Official Information Act, suggests that the agency could take 5 per cent of the royalties from industrial and pharmacological activities on the ice.

Alternatively, it suggests a bioprospecting licence fee of between $20,000 and $100,000.

The paper also considers other options including a moratorium on bioprospecting, or extracting commercial benefits from natural compounds.

The head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade's Antarctic policy unit, Felicity Wong, told the New Zealand Antarctic conference in Auckland this week that bioprospecting raised new legal issues.

She said:

* Meteorites, which are easier to spot on the frozen continent, "are now routinely being collected from Antarctica in order to make commercial gains".

* Australia is running an Antarctic research programme on "investigation of genetic resources".

* Although New Zealand citizens and others in the Ross Sea region need Government approval to run tourist operations on the ice, citizens of other countries operate under a variety of looser regulations.

* Illegal fishing in the Indian Ocean part of the Southern Ocean is "a serious problem", despite attempts to regulate it by the 24-nation Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, based in Hobart.

She said the Officials Antarctic Committee in Wellington had considered Antarctica New Zealand's discussion paper, and planned to refer the whole bioprospecting issue to the next Antarctic Treaty meeting in Poland in September.

A lobbyist with the Antarctic and Southern Oceans Coalition, Dr Alan Hemmings, said the problems were small-scale so far, apart from the illegal fishing.

He said American tourists were picking up small meteorites in a kind of "space-age trainspotting", and some private US researchers were looking for commercially valuable compounds.

These activities did not square with the Antarctic Treaty provision that all scientific information gathered on the continent would be freely available to all.

"I would have thought that the appropriate response is a moratorium on all that activity until such time as we have a better idea of how to sort it out," he said.

The coalition is also calling for a worldwide moratorium on catching Southern Ocean toothfish.

nzherald.co.nz/environment