Joanna Goven: GM release a gamble not worth the candle

COMMENT

The Prime Minister, Helen Clark, consistently characterises her refusal to extend the moratorium on applications for the release of genetically modified organisms into the environment as "rational".

The Environment Minister, Marian Hobbs, derides those who oppose lifting the moratorium as Luddites who are anti-research. Decisions around GM need, she says, to be made with rational consideration.

But who is being irrational here? It is increasingly difficult to discern a rational argument for lifting the moratorium next Wednesday.

We have been told that lifting the moratorium is the only economically responsible path. But where is the evidence that pursuing a GM path will result in economic benefit?

We have spent millions building a clean, green image. Research carried out by Lincoln University for the Ministry for the Environment indicated that GM release would substantially devalue that brand.

It presented evidence that a significant proportion (25 to 37 per cent) of consumers in Australia, the United States and Britain (not even the most GM-hostile markets) would be less likely to buy our food products, even if the product in question were GM-free. Some would buy at a price discount, but most would not.

An even greater proportion of these consumers (about half) would be more likely to buy our food products if we decided not to release GMOs into the environment.

Is it rational to gamble away our existing market advantage, and forgo an even greater advantage, for the possibility of insect-resistant potatoes or herbicide-resistant onions - products that may not only be unwanted in our high-value target markets but that may devalue other products in those markets?

The arguments provided in favour of the economic benefits of GM rely heavily on hypothetical productivity gains. But even if these gains turn out to be real and long-term, productivity increases cannot be assumed to lead to higher overall returns on commodity markets, where increases in supply tend to produce lower prices.

When Monsanto, presumably rationally, withdrew from European cereals markets, an industry insider remarked: "If there's no market for something, you go elsewhere," and suggested the markets for GM food products lay in China, Southeast Asia and South America.

Is production for these markets a rational strategy for New Zealand to overcome its dependence on supply-vulnerable commodity prices?

The Government argues that lifting the moratorium is also essential to research in biotechnology.

It may be a way to enable some kinds of research into the effects of GMOs in the wider environment. But it is not essential to much other research - such as into important aspects of horizontal gene transfer, random-integration effects, and more precise and controllable insertion techniques - that is also necessary for understanding or mitigating the effects of GMOs in the environment. Nor is it essential to the wide range of other biotechnology applications that we could be pursuing in place of GM.

The Government has tried to justify its decision by referring to its funding of research, identified as necessary by the royal commission. But, as the Ministry of Research, Science and Technology has just acknowledged in its report on Government responses to the royal commission's recommendations, "the recent nature of the research ... makes it likely that the full results, and consequently their contribution to policy, will not be seen for some time".

Is it rational to lift the moratorium long before you have the results of research you have commissioned, which is relevant to decisions on whether to allow GMOs into the environment?

How will the Environmental Risk Management Authority's decisions be "robust" without this information? And is it rational to lift the moratorium before the authority's many deficiencies, identified in a Government-commissioned review, have been rectified?

Further, the Government's record of incorporating research findings into its decision-making in this area is poor. The Ministry of Research report notes Professor Brian Wynne's observation that, because of its size, New Zealand "appears to be capable of rapid assimilation of scientific research knowledge into policy thinking".

Yes, this assimilation can happen relatively readily, but it won't happen if the Government refuses to accept research findings that it does not like. And that has been its record.

For example, the Treasury's executive summary of the Lincoln report rejects or second-guesses the researchers' findings: it underplays projected gains from a no-release strategy and overplays projected gains from the commercial release of GMOs.

The Treasury's advice, embraced by the Cabinet, reflects only this reinterpretation of the evidence. Does this constitute rational consideration? Is it rational to discount potential risks as "unproven" but treat (unproven) potential benefits as money in the bank?

We are also told it is essential to our economic future that intellectual property in GM agriculture be developed here. But this has not been explained.

Intellectual property ownership is valuable only if there is a market for the products it generates - so, again, we are back to the absence of consumer demand for these products.

Development of intellectual property in other forms of biotechnology does not require environmental release.

Further, we have no evidence that intellectual property ownership - in a market characterised by takeovers of small intellectual property owners by larger ones - is likely to remain here.

Is it rational to sacrifice our existing agricultural and tourism market advantage for the advantage of intellectual property ownership that may well end up overseas? Where is the policy work to ensure that this does not happen?

We are told that extending the moratorium will lead to a drain in scientific expertise vital to a knowledge economy. Scientific expertise is diverse.

Expertise in GM is essential. But the vast majority of research using GMOs and commercial applications of GMOs never has to leave containment.

Only if the Government insists on a policy of directing funding towards research into development of GMOs intended for release does a moratorium threaten our scientific research capacity. And each public investment in GMO development has sacrificed expertise in other areas.

Where is the evidence that the expertise we may lose by extending the moratorium is any greater or more significant than the expertise we have been losing and will continue to lose by skewing funding towards those who develop GMOs for release?

Far from rational argument, what we have seen from the Government is an irrational failure to learn from mistakes.

It is not a comparison the Government welcomes. Its conduct recalls its British counterpart's handling of the risks of BSE: disregard unwelcome scientific advice; let emphasis on short-term economic "rationality" override early warnings of danger; exaggerate certainty and the ability to make "robust" decisions based on present knowledge; neglect the potential for societal and industry practices to generate risk; and vilify those who ask awkward questions or report inconvenient findings.

Perhaps it is time for the Government to stop characterising the public as irrational and start reflecting on the rationality of its own decisions.

* Joanna Goven, a lecturer in political science at Canterbury University, is convenor of the Science and Technology Studies Network.