Alan Oxley: Biosafety pact threatens future of food exports

COMMENT

It's dangerous in the Antipodes. We are so far from anywhere that we face the risk of dropping out of the global mainstream and, even worse, deluding ourselves to think that it is a plus to do so.

Wellington has just reminded us of this hazard by announcing it will ratify the Cartegena Biosafety Protocol.

What does this achieve? The agreement is a protocol to the Convention on Biodiversity. It requires parties to report to a central repository when the export is planned of a product which is a "living modified organism". This is a product that is genetically modified and can replicate itself, such as a kiwifruit, but not, for example, husked rice, which is inert.

The protocol also gives parties the authority to ban imports of such a product.

Marian Hobbs, the Environment Minister, has pointed out that ratification of Cartegena will not give New Zealanders any greater protection.

"We already have law covering the importation of organisms that come within the protocol, so there'll be no change in the case-by-case way we deal with genetically modified organisms imported or used in New Zealand," she said.

So why ratify it? In her words: "We are ratifying the protocol because New Zealand is a good international citizen and we are committed to comprehensive biosecurity."

Fine. But what she did not mention is how the convention seriously undermines the protection the World Trade Organisation gives New Zealand against trading partners who have a long-established track record of abusing quarantine powers to block imports of competitively priced food products. This is how New Zealand farmers see Japan, the European Union and Australia.

The WTO does not allow any member to stop imports on health grounds willy-nilly. New Zealand is correctly challenging Australia to demonstrate, as WTO rules require, that there is a scientific justification for its quarantine bans on imports of New Zealand apples. If it cannot, Canberra will have to let them in.

The Cartegena Protocol unequivocally gives parties the right to ban an import of a living modified organism "without scientific justification". Note that phrase.

The EU and Japan have ratified the protocol. And when New Zealand does as well, it will sign away its right to demand that the EU or Japan shows scientific cause should either ban imports of, say, GMO kiwifruit.

In reality, they might do this simply because the New Zealand product is cheaper than the domestically produced competitor fruit. (Luckily for New Zealand, Australia has not ratified the protocol. So Wellington can still use WTO provisions to prevent Canberra abusing import controls on food.)

There is no accident. Lori Wallach, one of the most prominent anti-free trade activists in the United State, made this clear in her anti-WTO diatribe Whose Trade Organisation, which was published in 1999. Activists needed to get the Cartegena Protocol ratified quickly, she urged, so the provisions of the WTO could be undermined.

She was not alone. When negotiations for the protocol wrapped up a year later, Australia argued there should be a provision protecting the WTO rights of members. EU environment officials refused point-blank to include one.

In truth, very few GMO products are produced or traded, despite the hysteria about this. So why not ratify?

This is a reasonable question, unless you are a country that sees its future in world markets as a food producer.

Within 20 years, most leading food products will be genetically modified in some way. NZ already shot its food future in the foot once, by banning GMO research, and needed a royal commission to certify to the common sense of GMO technology.

Why then commit to rules that will give bigger countries the capacity to ban New Zealand food products at will? To be a good international citizen?

The debate in New Zealand and Australia on GMOs has been two-dimensional. Greenpeace has demonised GMO foods as "Frankenstein foods". But what about the global mission Australia and New Zealand have as providers of food to the world?

The world's population is continuing to rise. How can all these people be fed without substantially increasing land under farm acreage and putting even more stress on the environment?

Some US environmentalists now contend that only by using GMO technology to increase the levels of nutrition in food and the rate of productivity per hectare can we sustainably feed the world in the future.

Some radical ecologists argue it would be better to force the world's population to shrink. This is a polite way of saying, "Let them starve". Presumably, that is not the sort of "good global citizen" that Marian Hobbs has in mind.

* Alan Oxley is a former Australian ambassador to Gatt (the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), the predecessor to the WTO.