KEY POINTS:
The Sustainability Council is calling for New Zealand to regain control of its food safety regulation, by renegotiating a trans-Tasman agreement on food standards.
The council says the national regulator, the Food Safety Authority (NZFSA), last year shopped for a more palatable assessment of the safety of a genetically-engineered maize after it received an unfavourable evaluation from state science company, Environmental Science and Research (ESR).
"New Zealand can, in theory, go its own way and decline approval for a particular new food," said the council's executive director, Simon Terry.
But a stand-alone stance, separate from Australia's, required exceptional grounds, and the contracting out of primary responsibility for scientific assessment of novel foods, had left New Zealand with a reduced capacity to devise and defend any independent viewpoint.
"NZFSA is more a notional regulator of new foods - the appearance of sovereign regulation, but without the capacity to deliver on this," said Mr Terry, whose Wellington think-tank yesterday published a 47-page report on assessment and regulation of new foods.
"The highest priority is to achieve an unrestricted right to differentiate from Australia," he said.
One alternative to a subordinate relationship with Australia would be to establish cooperation arrangements with one or more other selected regulators.
Mr Terry highlighted his call with an allegation that NZFSA sought out alternative advice when a report it had commissioned from ESR questioned the safety of MON863, marketed as Maxguard and genetically engineered to make the corn resist rootworm pests.
After a French study reported signs of organ toxicity in rats fed this variety of GE corn, Lou Gallagher at ESR told NZFSA said there were toxicological concerns over the corn that could not be refuted without further study.
Ten weeks after receiving the Gallagher report in June 2007, and two days after the Ombudsman wrote to NZFSA following its refusal to release it to the Sustainability Council, the authority asked ESR for an "updated" report.
The new document - produced by a different ESR division - was actually a letter that carried no clear reference to the Gallagher report or its scientific conclusions.
Signed off by a group that NZFSA knew had originally passed on the work after stating it lacked the appropriate expertise, the letter indicated there was no scientific evidence that MON863 was unsafe to eat.
NZFSA provided both the Gallagher report and the letter to its minister in November 2007.
Mr Terry said ESR did not withdraw the Gallagher report and its concerns had still not been answered.
The case followed a controversial approval of another form of GE corn, LY038, that carried high levels of the amino acid lysine.
Mr Terry said the authority did not investigate health concerns, and the animal feed was approved as a human food despite a lack of credible public benefits in doing that.
Concerns over GE maize triggered the "Corngate" controversy during the 2002 election campaign, but Mr Terry said the Sustainability Council had not raised the NZFSA handling of GE maize in the context of the current general election.
The timing was related to the Government's September 18 revised mandate for NZFSA.
"Safety regulation for new foods now has zero credibility," said Mr Terry, who called for a legal requirement for NZFSA to take a precautionary approach when assessing risk.
Dr Gallagher had said the experiments on MON863 left "significant uncertainty" and Mr Terry said scientific uncertainty should have triggered a precautionary approach of either doing more research to determine why MON863 trials produced unexpected results, or else revoking the GE corn's approval for want of evidence that it was safe.
- NZPA
