Lincoln, New Zealand
September 26, 2002

Howard Bezar

New Zealand Institute for Crop and Food Research chief executive Paul Tocker welcomed the discussion paper on changes to the HSNO Act with regard to ‘conditional release’ of new organisms. “ We have pest-resistant potatoes ready for farm scale evaluation and need more certainty so that we can move ahead,” he said.

“However, we urge all parties to work together to ensure that we have enabling, rather than restricting legislation. If we try to anticipate the unknown with detailed legislation for future situations, we will end up with a costly bureaucratic process and legislation which won’t stand the test of time. We need to have simple enabling legislation and develop policy and regulations as knowledge and technology advances,” he said.

Mr Tocker said that our major trading partners such as Australia and the USA are dealing with the GM issues with existing legislation. As a small country we should not be bureaucratic, and we do need to be competitive if we want to have a thriving agriculture and biotechnology future.

“New Zealand is placing a considerable stake on our leading edge biotechnology to move us up the OECD rankings and I’m concerned that anything that impinges on our competitiveness such as restrictive legislation or a higher cost structure may damage our export opportunities,” said Mr Tocker.

The “conditional release” concept is also critical for scientists to address the environmental questions that taxpayers want answers to. “Our trading partners accept that this is a reasonable cost to taxpayers, and so should we,” he said.

The conditional release proposal is the intermediate stage between highly contained field trials and uncontained general release. The conditional release category is to enable the ‘clinical trials’ of GM plants and animals be undertaken and also to enable ERMA and developers to work out codes of practice for containing some categories of new organisms following completion of contained field trials.

Crop & Food Research and several other organisations submitted to the Royal Commission that this intermediate level of release would be valuable both for conducting environmental risk assessment on an appropriate scale and as the final release level for GM `medicinal herbs’ - plants that produce bioactive compounds such as pharmaceuticals.