Rules hampering plant research

Parliament's primary production select committee will probe whether biosecurity and environmental risk management constraints are impeding the breeding of pasture plants in New Zealand.

Committee chairman John Carter said last week the committee plans to call in officials from agriculture, environment and environmental risk agencies in early April to probe the extent to which researchers have been hamstrung by the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act (HSNO).

The committee was told New Zealand's pastoral agriculture depends on continuing innovation in fodder species for livestock, but that since the HSNO Act was applied to plants and seeds imported as "new organisms" after 1998, the supply of new material for breeding had withered.

"Importation of seed lines for evaluation by the industry has dropped from 50 to 200 lines annually to less than 10 for most companies," the president of the Institute of Agricultural and Horticultural Science, John Lancashire, of Raumati South, told the committee.

The 500-600 different plant species imported annually before 1998 had dropped to only three since 1998, he said.

Dr Lancashire, a former general manager of the Grasslands Research centre run at Palmerston North by the DSIR and now AgResearch, said that 1200 of the 1800 forage species held at its Margo Forde Germplasm Centre cannot be released under current regulations. An international resource containing 70,000 seed samples, the centre is seen by many researchers as a seed bank of last resort for Australasian grasslands.

Future opportunities were being lost in biotechnology, which needed new genes to work on, in endophytes that could make new types of cereals viable, and in plants needed to cope with climate change so that farmers had the tools for a warmer and drier New Zealand.

There were also opportunities being lost in terms of being able to incorporate plants containing tannins to boost the digestibility and animal health qualities of fodder, and in developing new grasses and other forage plants able to give very high yields for biofuels and for dairying.

"In the case of overseas forage germplasm, it appears that the costs of mitigating or avoiding risk now far outweigh the costs of avoiding risk," Dr Lancashire said.

He said that the system used by New Zealand for most of the second half of the 20th century was largely based on the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry giving research organisations permission to grow overseas material in the field under quarantine.

The plantings were inspected regularly by experts in insects and plant diseases and issues such as weediness potential were dealt with before a trial was started.

"No evidence of serious biosecurity breaches as a result of these forage evaluations has been found," he said. "A return to this system with appropriate modification would solve many of the problems." If this could not be done under the current constraints of the HSNO Act, then the law should be changed, he said.

Dr Lancashire said early work on selections of perennial ryegrass and white clover had led to Huia white clover, Ruanui perennial ryegrass, Akaroa cocksfoot and the world-famous Ellett and Nui perennial ryegrass.

But for further improvement, such as cool season or summer growth or tolerance of new pests and diseases, pasture species had needed new genes. From the 20 cultivars covering 12 species in the early 1970s, researchers had developed 115 forage cultivars - 65 per cent of which contained recent imports of germplasm - covering 26 species.

A particularly important development had been the breeding of perennial ryegrasses infected with an endophyte, a wild fungus which helped the plant resist attacks from pests without harming livestock.

Ryegrasses so far released with these "safe" endophytes were now valued at about $100 million a year - but all the endophytes had been imported.

Dr Lancashire said that over the past decade improved pasture species had contributed $2.94 billion a year to pastoral exports, and the value of imported germplasm in that was $735 million a year. This was a 600 per cent increase on the value of $128 million a year in 1992 - far greater than the overall 75 per cent increase in pastoral exports in that time.

- NZPA