Posted on 7-10-2003

NZ Government Drags Country Into GE

Against NZ-wide protests it seems general field release of GE crops will
shortly take place in what could have been the best site in the world for a
biotech-free zone. Chris Wheeler, former head of New Zealand's foremost
organic farm lobby group, the Soil & Health Association, investigates.

(Wellington, October 4, 2003) New Zealand is presently doing a slow death
march towards open-slather field release of genetically engineered farm
crops, dictated by a government which has relentlessly ignored every
reasoned argument for retaining this country's totally GE-free status. With
all the subtlety of a rubbish compactor, a NZ Government made up of
Christian fundamentalists and the tattered remnants of the Lange/Douglas
regime that turned this country into an economic basket case in the 80s, is
forging ahead with legislation that will pave the way for the end of the
present New Zealand-wide moratorium on GE crops on October 29th.

It seems an absurd move to make at the present time for a nation which
destroyed its local industrial base with market forces ideology in the 80s
and is now almost totally dependent for its overseas earnings on the export
of conventional or organic agricultural products to Northern Hemisphere
markets which not only demand GE-free produce, but have already warned New
Zealand that GE contamination of any sort is unacceptable. To comprehend
this apparent economic suicide by an almost totally farm-dependent country
you have to understand the weird political mindsets that still rule in the
only nation in the world to totally convert to Chicago School economic
theories, a move that took New Zealand from its position among the top ten
nations in the developed world in the 60s and 70s to its present position
as a near economic basket case ranked among the worst performers in the OECD.

For nearly twenty years now, Kiwis (appropriately, perhaps, a flightless
bird that digs for worms in the dark) have been asked, by a succession of
politicians and a kaleidoscope of ever-shifting coalition governments, to
wait for the light at the end of the tunnel promised by the original 1984
Lange (1)/Douglas Labour Government, while
experiencing huge social dislocation, dramatic drops in household income
and spending power, huge increases in violent and property crime, and the
disappearance of guaranteed employment and leisure time. Regrettably we
never seem to learn, having re-elected in the current minority Labour
Government many of the very team - including the Prime Minister Helen Clark
- who instituted the disastrous "New Zealand Experiment" in the first
place! Clark, it should be added, is a wholehearted supporter of genetic
engineering and sees GE as another heady experiment/fire truck to chase,
with all the glamour of Milton Friedman's original ideas, plus the added
incentive of getting back on side with a pro-GE White House after a 20-year
stand-off caused by New Zealand's anti-nuclear policy.

It's an undoubted fact that Helen Clark's adamant position in favour of GE
is also a reflection of the hubris and vanity afflicting her following her
easy victory over National Party PM Jenny Shipley at the close of the 20th
Century. Shipley's "Matron Knows Best" condescension towards her many
critics, coupled with her cabinet's epic absence of competence in almost
every area of administration, made a Clark-led Labour coalition victory
inevitable and ever since New Zealand's current PM has ridden
high on both Preferred Leader and citizen popularity polls.

That status may not last much longer, however. The manner in which the GE
issue in New Zealand has caught the imagination of the thinking portion of
the population has surprised even this critic, with grass roots opposition
to GE spreading rapidly from professional bodies such as Physicians and
Scientists for Responsible Genetics and the talent-heavy Sustainability
Council (including ex-national farmers' head Sir Peter Elworthy and
Hollywood star Sam Neill) to the high-profile Mothers Against Genetic
Engineering (MADGE), who recently grabbed public attention by demonstrating
in fluorescent pink bras in Parliament's debating chamber. As I was just
about to post this story MADGE have shocked even wider debate - this time
over the $26.4 million of public money voted towards GE research involving
the insertion of human genes into cows - by bill-boarding and postering the
main centres with the provocative image of a nude MADGE member with
genetically engineered multiple breasts attached to a milking machine!

The Government's case for GE hasn't been helped by recent news that Denmark
is moving to ban glyphosate/Roundup in agriculture due to residues of that
chemical with its known cancer link now being present in that nation's
artesian water supply. Many NZ communities draw their water from aquifers
where glyphosate and other leaching pesticides are popular and tests in the
early 90s indicated pesticide contamination in all the main underground
water sources. Glyphosate resistance is, of course, the chief selling point
in the proposed GE crops, including the recently proposed (by state quango
Crop & Food Research) GE onions that NZ taxpayer money is funding, but the
international evidence from over eight years of glyphosate resistant GE
crops indicates that not only do weeds become resistant to it (and all the
other favoured
herbicides), but that all-round pesticide use actually increases rather
than decreases, contradicting the main selling point for GE crops in the
first place, i.e. low pesticide use.

So Helen Clark is buying into a fight that is going to cost her dearly.
We've already seen Auckland's main street packed end to end with over
50,000 demonstrators against GE - something that hasn't been seen in New
Zealand since the unemployment riots of the Great Depression. And, this
week (October 11), further demonstrations with all the sophisticated
Internet-savvy pre-planning of the Seattle and Genoa anti-WTO
confrontations will be taking place in all the main centres on both islands
and sending an even stronger message to the Clark Government that its rigid
position in favour of GE is unacceptable. With even normally conservative
opposition leaders like NZ First's Winston Peters speaking out in favour of
a further five year moratorium on GE field releases, PM Clark and her
unheeding cabinet would do well to start listening now, before they lose
electoral confidence and deal a death blow to the last sector of the
national economy which still makes real money for the country -
agriculture, which, bolstered by a heavily promoted "Clean & Green" image
based on conventional and organic production methods, contributes 75
percent of annual export earnings.

Realistically I can't see her listening at this point, however. She and her
fussy ex-school ma'am Environment Minister Marian Hobbs dig themselves
deeper and deeper into a rigid biotech defence position week by week as
October 29 approaches, making it almost impossible for any compromise to be
reached at this point without the loss of considerable political "face".
More to the point, they have all been caught out lying over the
"accidental" releases of GE contaminated corn at field sites up and down
both North and South Islands and the suspicion amongst all of us with any
insight into on-farm matters is that the GE corn release in 2000 (and
possibly both earlier and later), far from being "accidental" was
deliberately and carefully planned by the biotech corporates in North
America who supplied the seed in the first place.

This, of course, is the inevitable conclusion you will come to if you read
Kiwi GE activist Nicky Hager's revealing book, Seeds of Distrust, (2) on
the whole GE corn debacle that led up to the 2002 NZ parliamentary
election. Over the past two months as the official investigation into some
of the book's claims has limped to an end (earnestly, but
incompetently covered up by Labour PR flakes) it is quite clear that the
Labour Party deliberately lied and tried to hide evidence of a GE release
and then played dirty politics with the naïve Greens, effectively smearing
them as treacherous trouble-makers in the electorate's eyes. This cost the
Greens party votes under the new MMP voting system and their place in a
coalition Government and heralded in a Labour/Christian Democrat alliance
notable for its lickspittle compliance with Helen Clark's every whim.
Notable also for some particularly silly pieces of legislation like the
poorly executed farm "Fart Tax", which have clogged the Parliamentary
process for the past year while more vital issues are ignored. These
ignored issues include New Zealand's recent UN world ranking third place
for child murders and child abuse and the huge increase in drug-related
crimes, which an under-staffed police force seem unable to stop - all, one
should add, an inevitable part of the rot that entered NZ society in 1984..

Are New Zealand farmers aware of the implications in taking on GE crops
that North American farmers have already proved cost more, yield less and
lose them export markets? Not really. Farmers I've spoken to all up and
down New Zealand are almost totally ignorant of the true state of affairs
out on the prairies of North America. Despite the vital importance of such
information at this point in time, none of them were aware that even the US
Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service has stated
categorically that it can find no advantages to US farmers in growing GE
crops and, furthermore, cannot explain farmers' earlier ready acceptance of
biotech industry promises. (3)

The reason for this ignorance is not hard to find. The New Zealand farm
press, these days largely owned by bean counters in Australia and heavily
reliant on chemical/biotech industry advertising, criminally neglects the
whole issue of GE failures and only grudgingly mentions organic agriculture
despite the geometric growth of NZ organic exports over the past five
years. A recent survey conducted by the South Island's Lincoln University
found that the majority of Kiwi farmers surveyed were still sitting on the
fence over the whole GE issue. More to the point, the Clark Government has
just voted a further $80 million to biotech experiments, which includes the
sum mentioned earlier for the human genes-into-cows absurdity. Typically,
any GE research application over the past five years has received millions
in taxpayer dollars and farmers have been misled at every turn by biotech
interests and politicians alike into thinking that GE is the wave of the
future for farming. Government investment in biotech, after all, proves the
point. Organic agriculture only received $300,000 from government in the
same period! In fact organic agriculture, the only agricultural area in New
Zealand showing huge growth and the only sector of the international
produce market facing an insatiable demand is, by contrast, almost
completely ignored in the very country which could most successfully link
it to New Zealand's existing "Clean & Green" mythology. Unfortunately a
general lack of political savvy in the NZ organics
movement doesn't help matters, but that's another story.

The general apathy demonstrated by New Zealand's ruling Federated Farmers
towards key GE issues is not, of course, shared by their cousins across the
Tasman Sea, who have effectively obtained state-wide bans on GE crops
everywhere but in Queensland and the Northern Territory. As much as
anything else, this is probably a reflection of the fact that Aussie
farmers are a lot better served by both their farmer organisations, their
rural media and their state political machines. New Zealand farmers should
have made careful note of the negative reaction of Japanese importers to
last June's discovery that a NZ sweet corn shipment was contaminated with
GE corn. But they all seem to have been asleep at the wheel when the news
came through. Japan and the European Union, our other major customer for
non-GE farm produce, told New Zealand years ago that their consumers wanted
only guaranteed non-GE produce and this country with its narrow
agricultural littorals and steady winds is probably the worst location in
the world for maintaining segregation zones between organic and
conventional crops and their GE equivalents. We simply CANNOT guarantee
GE-free status of a conventional or organic crop once we permit planting of
its GE equivalent. Wind-blown GE pollen and seed dispersal is even more
likely in NZ than on the prairies of North America where it has already
made the growing of organic or conventional canola and - probably,
ultimately - corn and soya, impossible.

But it's a comment on a national malaise that has bewildered overseas
visitors whenever they come up against it - a dumb evasion of
intellectually-demanding issues coupled to grovelling acceptance of
undemocratic Government diktats - that best explains why New Zealanders
will ultimately let Helen Clark have her way and see this country totally
cave in to corporate biotech demands for open-slather GE planting. I'd like
to think it could be different, but 40 years of activism on social and
environmental issues tells me that New Zealand politicians in particular
never learn and the colonial cringe that sees us always bend eventually to
North American corporate-led paternalism will see our "Clean & Green"
mythology crumble into the dust where it probably belongs.

When all is said and done, the reality at an agricultural level in New
Zealand has been that we readily embraced chemical farming, including the
most carcinogenic pesticides (and their consequences!), when American
corporates offered it to us once before and we will do the same thing again
- unquestioningly - now that those same
corporates are offering us GE crops. Unfortunately for commonsense, as well
as intelligence, there is neither the political will nor the support from
the bulk of New Zealand's conservative farming community to do anything else.

(1.) New Zealanders who followed the original Parliamentary debate on the
nation's anti-nuclear legislation derive cynical amusement from the news
that 1984 Labour Prime Minister David Lange recently received an
"Alternative Nobels" Right Livelihood Award "for his steadfast work over
many years for a world free of nuclear weapons." If the truth be known,
Lange reluctantly supported NZ's anti-nuclear legislation as a sop to
public opinion, while busy about destroying the NZ economy and selling off
taxpayer assets to the highest overseas bidder according to the IMF and
World Bank's classic Friedman model. Wealthy NZers cashed up under the
Lange regime, buying up state assets in insider deals matching anything
Russian Mafiosi have since pulled off, and several of the rich white men
who benefited most are still wandering the world for global capitalism
promoting myths about the success of "The New Zealand Experiment" to those
silly enough to listen. The truth about what really happened to NZ is still
hard to find inside the country itself due to monitoring and censorship of
the media by corporate law teams employed by those who benefited most.
Although in failing health, Lange still tries to stifle criticism of his
years in power with threats of litigation and as a consequence of all the
above most New Zealanders still have only the vaguest idea of his true role
in their slide into Third World status. Genetic engineering is far from
being the first silly experiment NZ politicians have indulged themselves
with.

(2.) Nicky Hager, "Seeds of Distrust - The Story of a GE Cover-Up", Craig
Potton Publishing, Nelson, NZ, 2002.

(3.) "The Adoption of Bioengineered Crops," Report of the Economic Research
Service, US Dept of Agriculture, May 2002, Website:
www.ers.usda.gov/publications/aer810/