Kevin Taylor: Corngate returns, with less impact

Labour must have briefly felt an awful sense of deja vu when it heard the news. The Greens might just get a pre-election fillip.

But the latest GM corn scare is unlikely to have the impact that Corngate did on election eve in 2002 when author Nicky Hager released his book Seeds of Distrust alleging a Government coverup two years earlier of a suspected GM scare.

The authorities have dealt with six such occurrences in the past three years.

And they appear to have learnt the public relations lesson from the blatant attempt to downplay the scare in 2000.

At the time virtually nobody attended a press conference held by then biosecurity minister Marian Hobbs announcing "new safeguards" against the introduction of GM seed.

An accompanying press release revealed only in the fifth paragraph that some sweetcorn "might" have been contaminated with GM material.

Those PR manoeuvres only fed suspicions of a coverup, but times have changed.

Yesterday both MAF and Biosecurity Minister Jim Sutton released statements and while nobody's saying where the corn came from and where it's being stored, the approach is far more enlightened.

Greens co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons expressed the party's frustration yesterday that several days after the Government had been told of the positive test, it was still not known exactly what it showed, leaving the public "in limbo".

But there's unlikely to be any great public alarm.

Prime Minister Helen Clark acknowledged that on the campaign trail in Upper Hutt yesterday, saying the issue did not have the atmospherics it had in 2002.

"I think a lot was learned from the way that was handled ... Now officials know that they have to put it out there, have to go through the process. The system does work."

For GM opponents, the latest scare is worrying in its scale.

In the 2000 scare, a 5.6 tonne batch of possibly GM-contaminated seed (whether it was contaminated was never satisfactorily answered) was planted on 164ha in Hawkes Bay, Gisborne and Blenheim.

The latest investigation involves 13,500 tonnes of harvested corn, which at a yield of about 11 tonnes per hectare means about 1200ha might be involved.

However while it may be a bigger headache for officials, there is unlikely to be a hangover for Labour this time.