Company claims NZ safe from GE corn products

By KEVIN KANE

UPDATE - New Zealand consumers will not be affected by the Gisborne sweetcorn or any of its products found to be contaminated with genetically engineered (GE) material, the company involved said today.

Sunrise Coast New Zealand Ltd admitted it was the company being investigated after the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (MAF) earlier confirmed a very low level of GE of products made from sweetcorn grown at four sites in Gisborne.

Sunrise Coast managing director Tim Chrisp said in a statement that the sweetcorn from which the sample was collected was from "a very small lot of corn" packed for the Japanese food service market.

"We have very thorough systems for product traceability and can clearly identify the field from which the sweetcorn raw material was taken.

"None of the sweetcorn from this variety field or in these packages has been supplied to the New Zealand market."

MAF announced yesterday that investigators were heading to Gisborne this weekend to carry out tests after products from sweetcorn grown in the region tested positive for GE material.

MAF biosecurity group director Barry O'Neil told NZPA today the test results which came back last night showed the level of contamination which could be traced back to the seed was "very very low".

"We are talking a level of less than 0.05 per cent or less than 5 contaminated seeds per 10,000."

He said 200kg of the seed had been imported "which equates to 1.3 million seeds so we are talking about less than 600 of those that could be contaminated."

Mr O'Neal said while the test had confirmed the level of contamination, further investigation was going on into the source.

"The most probable way that this contamination arose is from the imported seeds, however we can't rule out that there has been post-processing contamination or that there was cross pollination of a field with another field.

"However I think the latter (cross-pollination) is unlikely as we don't see any relationship between these fields and the fields from the previous Pacific Seeds investigation."

Last year, Pacific Seeds told MAF it had found GE maize in seed made in New Zealand on its behalf by contract growers in Gisborne and Pukekohe.

Pacific Seeds destroyed the accidentally GE-tainted crop but called for New Zealand's zero tolerance policy to be changed "to a more realistic level".

Earlier the Green Party said the discovery of GE material in the sweetcorn showed the moratorium on the release of GE crops and animals should not be lifted in October.

"This is a wake-up call for the Government. It's a warning that if we go down this track that we will suffer serious economic setbacks," Green MP Sue Kedgley told NZPA today.

"What's it going to take for the Government to rethink its plans to lift the moratorium?

"We have had a report coming out saying Erma (the Environmental Risk Management Authority) is utterly flawed and it is quite bizarre that it has taken a Japanese pizza maker to alert us to the possibility of contamination in New Zealand."

Greenpeace said in a statement today that the incident was a wake-up call for the Government on a number of fronts:

* It confirmed that major export markets like Japan wanted GE-free produce and were testing to make sure that was what New Zealand was providing;

* it showed there was little understanding of how GE spread and that measures to deal successfully with contaminations were not in place, and

* it showed the "idiocy of legalising the release of unwanted and unpredictable GE crops in New Zealand from October".

MAF launched a probe on June 26 when it was alerted by a New Zealand sweetcorn exporter that a pizza manufacturer in Japan had received positive GE test results on a topping containing the processed kernels.

The corn seeds used to grow the crop had been tested and cleared before arriving in New Zealand.

However, on Thursday MAF received independent test results from AgriQuality in Melbourne.

They showed a negative GE test on the seeds, but a positive GE test on one product made from the harvested crop.

MAF said it could not rule out the possibility the seeds were also contaminated and the follow-up tests were done.

The investigation also involves the Food Safety Authority (FSA), Erma and the Environment Ministry.

- NZPA