Too late once you open Pandora's Box

By JEANETTE FITZSIMONS*

The Greens have been working to prevent the release of genetically engineered organisms into our environment for four years. It was the 92,000 signatures on my petition calling for a royal commission of inquiry and a moratorium on field trials and release that created the pressure on Labour to promise a royal commission. This moratorium is the final barrier between us and the release of GE organisms into New Zealand.

It is not about research, it is not about field trials, it is not about insulin for diabetics. It is about whether biotech corporates can apply for full, commercial release of plants, animals and micro-organisms into the New Zealand environment, our farms, our forests, our soils and our food chain.

A favourite claim is that without GE we cannot hope to feed a growing world population. They never say why GE will help. After all, people are starving because they have no land to grow crops or they have no money to buy food.

The assumption is that GE will produce more food per hectare but that hope has not come true. When you average soy bean crops over the whole of the US, the GE varieties produce at least 5 per cent less than normal ones. It's handy for farmers to be able to spray the whole crop with Roundup and kill the weeds but not the beans - but should our food supply be put at risk for this?

Apart from herbicide tolerance, which leads to more herbicide in our food, the other main crop modification inserts a gene to make a toxin to kill insect pests. It is leading to resistance to the Bt pesticide which is a safe pesticide relied on in emergencies by organic farmers.

Consumers not just in Europe but in Japan, Southeast Asia, belatedly in the US and, of course, in New Zealand are avoiding GE food wherever they can. That is why the industry has fought so hard against labelling it. It is also why a major demand by the US in any free-trade agreements is the removal of labelling requirements for US products.

Not that there's a lot to remove here - the loopholes in our labelling requirements are such that only one labelled product can be found on the shelves at present. The EU is considering adopting new labelling rules that will make ours look very slack.

The organic market worldwide is growing rapidly and the domestic market has doubled in two years. Organic standards do not permit GE. The royal commission advised that we should develop an industry code of practice for separation distances (buffer zones) between organic and GE crops. It said organics and GE could co-exist provided that the organic standard was changed to allow 1 per cent contamination with GE. This contamination occurs through pollen drift, bees, wind, birds taking seeds, failure to clean out equipment, storage and transport facilities between GE and non-GE batches, and spillage along roadsides from transport vehicles.

Neither the organic growers nor the consumers want their standard changed.

Just last month an EU report was leaked because it was such "dynamite". EU staff were trying to suppress it showing that growing GE will destroy the organics industry. This followed two years of research in four countries and gives weight to what most farmers already knew.

Australia has come to the same conclusion and has rejected buffer zones as unworkable and ineffective, and decided to sacrifice its organic industry.



GE organisms are patented and are increasing the control over seed sources by a few large global corporates. The value of the patent is privatised to the corporation that developed it but the cost of any damage to health or livelihood is socialised to all of us, or privatised to the unfortunate person affected. Basically, you can't sue.

Nor can you insure. There are only three categories of risk for which insurance companies won't take your money: nuclear accidents, war, and genetically engineered organisms. The Royal Commission on Genetic Modification was sufficiently concerned about the effects on soil and native ecosystems that it advised there should be more research before GE crops were approved for release.

Some of this research is under way and the ostensible reason for the moratorium is to allow this research to be done and to pass new legislation putting strict controls on release.

This is the heart of the disagreement between the Greens and Labour. First, the legislation lifts the moratorium automatically regardless of what the research findings are. Second, while it is true that field tests for experimental purposes, where the organisms are removed after the trial, can be made safer through stricter conditions, we do not accept that any conditions can make release safe. You can't have a careful release any more than you can be a little bit pregnant.

The other thing I've heard Pete talk about is sterility. Much has been written about the so-called terminator gene that will make plants unable to produce viable seed. To my knowledge no one has quite succeeded in doing this yet, but there have been huge arguments about the ethics of making plants sterile and the effects in developing countries of farmers not being able to save seed for the next season.

We should embrace the new science of genetics in the laboratory for all the benefits it can provide. It is already opening frontiers in understanding life, diagnosing disease, identifying genes to assist natural plant and animal breeding, and creating medicines such as insulin from genetically engineered micro-organisms which never leave a contained laboratory.

The Greens are in favour of all this, provided laboratory standards of containment are adequate. At present there is a moratorium on applying to release GE organisms - but it expires next year. All we are asking is that the next government keeps that moratorium in place throughout its next term.

* Greens co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons and Labour's Science Minister Pete Hodgson took part in a debate on genetic modification last week. This is an edited extract from that debate.

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