Heated debate over GE-Free future
Heated debate over GE-Free future as Minister defends government policy.
Criticism of consultation-costs raises fear of secret experiments to sideline public scrutiny.
Monday 12th November
There was heated debate at a public meeting at Sunnybrae School, Auckland North Shore, when Environment Minister Marion Hobbs, spoke publicly about the Government's response on genetic modification.
Addressing an audience of about 60 people the Minister invited those attending to highlight specific themes they wanted discussed, which included socialised risk and liability, controls on field trials, the international marketing image for New Zealand, and the use of cows as bioreactors for making pharmaceuticals.
Government policy open to "GE-Free
NZ" option
The Minister spoke for about 20 minutes and
raised a number of points that were challenged during the
sometimes-heated discussion. She defended the approval of
contained field-trials as a way to move forward that did not
rule out the option of keeping the food supply and general
environment "GE-Free". She pointed to trials conducted since
the 1980's that had been safely completed without
contamination. Ms Hobbs said
the Prime Minister had
publicly acknowledged the option to keep food-production
GE-Free -though it had gone unreported by the media. She
said this was still on the agenda being explored by the
Labour Party and that extensive GE cropping in New Zealand
was unlikely in the foreseeable future. The idea of GE-Free
zones in parts of the country was also of interest.
"Costly" Public Consultation
In response to
comments about the funding of monitoring field trials and
researching issues like Horizontal Gene Transfer, the
Minister said ERMA (The Environmental Risk Management
Authority) had not signalled a need for increased funding
for monitoring trials, but had raised the issue of the costs
involved in public consultation. After an angry response Ms
Hobbs conceded that the public's involvement was funded by
taxes paid by the New Zealand public and was not in fact
"free" as she had argued.
" It was outrageous to have the Minister come to a public meeting to talk about open and transparent processes and then complain about the costs of involving the public in decision-making", said Jon Carapiet from the Auckland GE-Free coalition. "Such reported criticism from ERMA raises the spectre of a push towards secret trials that could exclude the public from submissions, under the guise of cost-cutting measures."
'Possibly-Contaminated' US Corn seed imported to save a
thousand jobs
In response to questions on the biosecurity
threat from GM organisms Ms Hobbs said that the difficulty
in testing for GE contamination in corn seed had already
required the importation of seed from the US that had shown
some positive testing for GE. She defended the decision to
approve the importation claiming that otherwise a thousand
people would have been made unemployed. Ms Hobbs was
questioned on why the importers had not been required to
find other sources of uncontaminated seed such as Europe
where the Minister said testing for GE contamination was
becoming possible at levels of 0.05 %.
'No more
choice' as GE contaminates organic food
Other concerns
were raised about the spread of GE into the food chain
leading to all organic produce becoming contaminated and the
denial of any choice. One person said the US organic
industry already faced this scenario and co-existence of GE
and organic crops would force people to accept contamination
of up to 1%, and more.
Scientist raises issue of
public and science-community concerns
The cause of public
concern was also queried by a scientist, from Auckland
University, who talked about benefits from changes to
cancer-causing fungi that infect fruit. She said that she,
and many other scientists regularly use GE techniques but
acknowledged concerns amongst the Scientific Community
itself, over the use of constructs such as anti-biotic
resistance marker genes. The meeting discussed that Medical
uses were different to uses in food and that few people
opposed research for seriously ill people such as those with
Multiple Sclerosis. But trials with human genes in cows
raised ethical questions for the new Bio-ethics Council to
help consider, especially because of doubts about the truth
of the claimed medical intentions for the research.
Minister to publish response on web-site
A more complete
review of the Government's response to the Royal Commission
recommendations will be available on the Ministry of
Environment web site in the coming days.
ENDS