Michael Meacher

Labour Party | Oldham West and Royton

Kiwi caution

This article was published in the New Statesman.

In the teeth of intense opposition - including Mothers Against Genetic Engineering parading naked outside parliament and hoisting a display board showing a four-breasted woman linked to a milking machine - New Zealand's Labour government has just lifted a two-year moratorium on growing GM crops.

New Zealand (which I visited three months ago to give evidence to a select committee on this issue) has been through the same anguished public debate as the UK. Indeed, it had the world's first GM election in 2001 when the incumbent Labour government lost a significant swathe of seats because people accused it of secretly allowing in GM in defiance of the country's "clean green" image. As a result, Labour set up a royal commission on the subject. It recommended a cautious move towards GM, partly because New Zealand is thought to need a technological edge if it is to survive in an open trading system. But the royal commission proposed a controlled, case by case release of GM, as assessed by an Environmental Risk Management Authority, similar to the UK's Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment. But the royal commission assumed that it was possible to achieve adequate separation between organic or conventional crops and GM crops.

Increasingly, it seems that this assumption was wrong. While 98-99 per cent of GM pollen may well fall less than 100-200 metres from the GM plant, the rest may well not, and that still involves millions of GM pollen grains. In Saskatchewan, Canada, which I visited in July, farmers have found that, since it was introduced in 1996, GM canola (oilseed rape) has grossly contaminated organic/conventional crops, despite the vast open spaces of the prairies. In fact, organic canola has been virtually wiped out in Canada. If that happens there, the chances of keeping GM and organic/conventional crops separate in the more confined and tightly packed farming terrain of the UK are nil. Moreover, the European Commission, in a report last year, concluded it was virtually impossible to keep cross-contamination at less than 0.1 per cent without prohibitive changes in agronomic practice.

The UK government's GM Scientific Review Panel has reached a similar conclusion. So New Zealand is taking a great risk. Half its export income, bn a year, comes from primary production, and 95 per cent of its dairy produce goes abroad. Its priceless asset is its brand image as a clean green top-quality producer of dairy products. To cast doubt on that image by introducing GM for which there are no consumer benefits and where the alleged producer benefits (higher yields, less herbicide use, ready containment of contamination) are all discredited, might seem a hugely disproportionate risk to take. The NZ government's response is to say that the Enviromental Risk Management Authority is authorised to "take account" of any economic benefits of GM. But the legislation does not require it to take account of economic costs to the wider economy - and anyway it is doubtful that technical experts on risk management are qualified to evaluate that kind of evidence.

Issues of political/strategic importance cannot be reduced to administrative/technical ones. Neither New Zealand or the UK has yet properly tackled labelling. The EU makes labelling mandatory ( in New Zealand, it is voluntary) but only for foods that are more than 0.9 per cent GM. In other words, if you find a tin or packet in a supermarket that is not labelled, you still won't know whether it is actually GM-free or contains up to nearly 1 per cent GM. Nor does New Zealand - or the EU or North America - have any provision to compensate, by law, a farmer whose crops are contaminated by airborne pollen from GM plants or by impure seed. The farmer can suffer a significant loss of sales or even be driven out of business if, as an organic farmer, he loses his accreditation status. But the really big difference between New Zealand and the UK lies in the use envisaged for GM.

In New Zealand, it is expected that requests for GM approvals will be for very limited applications specific to the country - pine trees, possums (though with fears that the sterility gene proposed might cross to other species), potatoes and onions. Beyond these narrow areas, New Zealand intends to take every step possible to protect the priceless brand image of clean green dairy products. In the UK, by contrast, the results would be far more dramatic - countrywide cultivation of major food crops.