Bovine Export Ban Shows NZ Losing Out

Bovine Export Ban Shows NZ Losing Out on Lucrative Markets Due to Biosecurity Flaws.

GE Free NZ is concerned that New Zealand is missing out on business because of doubts about our biosecurity.

Biosecurity New Zealand (BioNZ) deregulated the New Zealand germplasm centres after an EU audit revealed deficiencies in its regulatory management of bovine embryos and semen exports to European Union (EU) countries, last year.

There were 40 irregularities identified. It is not known what kind, but it could be surmised that this is to do with non-compliance in the type of bovine products exported.

Karen Sparrow has been quoted in rural news journal Straight Furrow as saying "MAF were in no doubt there was no option other than to de-list the collection centres. The EU made it very clear that if we did not de-list the centres, they would remove New Zealand's approved status”.

“GE Free NZ would like to have confirmation that non of these bovine products were genetically engineered or cloned,” said Claire Bleakley of GE Free NZ in food and environment. “With the controversial approval of cloned animal meat in the EU and United States this is a strong possibility.”

The ban is still in place; impacting our exports and casting a shadow on our clean green image. Companies like the Tararua Breeding Centre Ltd who do not do any cloning or genetic engineering and export unmanipulated embryos have been severely affected.

New Zealand has spent millions of dollars experimenting and renting out its CRI’s to overseas Corporate’s to create genetically engineered products. The scientists have lost sight of the innovative ethical advance’s that made people like Sir Edmund Hillary famous.

The drain on other research that the push for GE has brought about has pushed good research and scientists conducting non- GE work into obscurity.

“It is time that funding agencies re-evaluated genetic engineering, the nuclear bomb of biotechnology, and cast it aside in favour of scientifically, economically and ethically responsible Biotechnology”.

ENDS:

References:

Bionz Defends De-Listing By Sandra Finnie, 14 December 2007 http://straightfurrow.farmonline.co.nz/news_daily.asp?ag_id=47503

BioNZ blunder: exporters By Sandra Finnie, 14 December 2007 http://straightfurrow.farmonline.co.nz/news_daily.asp?ag_id=47501

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