Posted
7th August 2001
Royal Omission
By
Peter Wills*
The Royal Commission on Genetic Modification has recommended
that thingsin New Zealand be left more or less just the way
they were before it started its work. Except for one thing:
we should abandon the possibility of a GE-free New Zealand,
something that a large proportion of the parties who participated
in the Commission's processes asked for. The Commission describes
excluding the possibility of a GE-free NZ as "Preserving Opportunities".
T The country's researchers, regulators and business people
have been given the green light again and the people who managed
to get the light changed to amber while the Commission did its
work have been told that they can have their GE-free New Zealand
in bits. The Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries will work
out how far apart GE farms and GE-free farms should be and when
disputes arise they will come in and mediate. The gist of the
Commission's attitude to genetic engineering can be gleaned
from the second sentence of their report's Executive Summary:
It [genetic modification] holds exciting promise, not only for
conquering diseases, eliminating pests and contributing to the
knowledge economy, but for enhancing the international competitiveness
of the primary industries so important to our country's economic
well-being.
Genetic engineering is cast as heroic, fitting perfectly into
the fashionable view of human good as the creation of wealth
and health through global capitalism. Furthermore, our academic
and governmental institutions, cooperating with industry, so
we are told, have got everything right, at least more or less.
The system needs just a bit of a tweak here and there, but they
have made no fundamental errors. The report cites everyone and
criticises no-one, but one has to look a little more closely
to see whose interests and interpretations of the facts have
been given weight. The recommendations make it very clear how
interests vested in genetic engineering have been weighed against
those somehow opposed to applications of the technology. In
all of the major areas, research, agriculture, food, patents
and liability, the Commission accepts the adequacy of the institutions
and practices that have already been put in place by experts
and makes only minor suggestions as to how things can be improved.
The unique circumstances of the "biotechnology century", as
the Commission calls our times, are dealt with by setting up
a Bioethics Council and a Parliamentary Commissioner on Biotechnology
and asking the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology
to develop a biotechnology strategy for the country. And then
the Minister in charge of the Environmental Risk Management
Authority is to have a "call in" power (that has never been
exercised) extended so that it includes the significant cultural,
ethical and spiritual issues that have been at the heart of
the debate about genetic engineering in New Zealand during the
last few years.
The wishes of those who went to the Commission and asked for
New Zealand's GE-free environment to be kept the way it is,
even for the time being, have simply been omitted from the substance
of the recommendations. It is recommended that there be research
into environmental impacts on soil and ecosystems, research
support for organic farming, a strategy for the use of Bt, protection
of GE-free honey, special assessment of GE trees and so on,
but all predicated on the progressive introduction of genetically
modified organisms into our agricultural environment. Everything
can exist side by side. It doesn't matter that mounting evidence
suggests that humans are pretty well incapable of keeping GE
farming and organic farming properly separate from one another.
New Zealanders will work out, as no-one else has managed to,
how to make cross-contamination impossible.
The main result of following the Commission's recommendations
will be that organic farmers will just have to accept Monsanto's
and Aventis's genes getting into their crops. The Australia
New Zealand Food Authority has already proposed that 1% contamination
with GE material in any product must be considered normal and
should not trigger any labelling requirement. The Commission
praised ANZFA, in spite of their blatantly unscientific support
for genetically engineered food. The Commission has accepted
the word of the experts from the academic-governmental-industrial
biotech complex and has set aside the concerns of people who
want to retain the integrity of more natural ways of practising
agriculture - free of wholesale wired-in manipulation for the
short-term commercial gain of big biotech multi-nationals. What
will our great great grandchildren think of the way we are treating
our world?
* Peter R Wills, tel: +64 - 9 - 373 7599 ext 8889, Associate
Professor Department of Physics, University of Auckland. Email, Wwebsite.. ...
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