'Too late' for GM soil test

Environment Minister Marian Hobbs says it is "not possible" to make scientific checks on the soil at a Northland site where a Crown science company grew genetically modified tamarillos.

Ms Hobbs said yesterday that she had previously said there should be research into the effect of genetically modified organisms on soil.

"But that research should be properly planned and conducted on a scientifically sound basis.

"It is not possible to do such work at Kerikeri now," she said. "We needed to understand the soil make-up before the plantings, so we could compare it afterwards."

When a spokesman for the minister was asked how the lack of a baseline study stopped the Government from paying for a straightforward analysis of whether the engineered DNA sequence had spread into soil organisms, he said no such study was proposed.

Instead, the minister was saying it would not be possible to compare the "before and after" soil communities, he said.

Last October, National's spokesman on Crown research institutes, Paul Hutchison, asked Ms Hobbs to fund an analysis of the soil.

She told him she had received no request from HortResearch for soil analysis.

And it was too late to assess the state of soil organisms before the GM trial or whether there had been any "transient effects", she said then.

Dr Hutchison, the MP for Port Waikato, said yesterday that he had wanted Ms Hobbs to pay for an assessment of whether engineered DNA had spread into soil organisms or remained in the soil in plant roots.

But Ms Hobbs said the Environmental Risk Management Authority had concluded there appeared to be no need for testing the soil.

Several community groups critical of the experiment have over the past two years called for such tests, and Dr Hutchison said yesterday that the Government had condoned efforts by HortResearch to gag criticism of its genetically modified tamarillos.

HortResearch last year had agreed to fumigate its tamarillo test site on the condition that two groups of critics, GE-Free NZ and GE-Free Northland stop initiating criticism of HortResearch over the trial.

Ms Hobbs yesterday suggested that misgivings expressed last year by the Royal Commission on Genetic Modification over the GM tamarillo trial would not have arisen had it been conducted under present controls.

The commission last year told the Government that it had heard "considerable public doubt" about the adequacy of the containment of a field trial of transgenic tamarillos at HortResearch's Northland research station.

HortResearch began research into GM tamarillos at Kerikeri in January 1998, to test whether tamarillo plants could be immunised against mosaic virus.

The plant resisted the virus - which has affected about 90 per cent of New Zealand's small tamarillo crop - and fruited well, and the experiment concluded in January last year.

The trial of 40 GM tamarillos covered about a third of the 0.2ha field and involved four rows of plants.

About half the plants in the middle rows were transgenic, while the rest were non-transgenic.

At the end of the trial the plants were pulled out and incinerated.

- NZPA

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