GE lobbyists take watchdog to court

Genetic engineering campaigners say a King Country farm that has been sold for more than $3 million after being used for genetic engineering experiments should be monitored for the next 15 years.

Claire Bleakley, a Featherston farmer who has argued against carrying out GE experiments outside laboratories, said she expected to file a legal action this week over the farm at Whakamaru, 37km southwest of Tokoroa, and its proposed "sign-off" by regulatory agencies.

Mrs Bleakley has raised questions over the failure of the regulatory watchdog, the Environmental Risk Management Authority (Erma), to require monitoring of the property for survival and transmission of altered DNA from more than 3000 GE sheep slaughtered on the property, or for the transmission of other organisms, such as prions, which cause the disease scrapie.

"We've got the paper trail now to take it to court," she said.

"We have tried every means possible to make them consider the correct process.

"They haven't considered it properly."

Erma has admitted there is no monitoring at the Whakamaru farm, and that there were no recommendations in place for on-site monitoring following the destruction of all genetic material.

Mrs Bleakley said Erma executives told her: "The site is no longer a registered containment facility and there are no requirements for on-site monitoring."

Failed biotech entrepreneur PPL Therapeutics used semen from transgenic rams at East Mains in Scotland on 100 New Zealand ewes at Whakamaru to create its foundation GE flock.

The animals were required to be kept in quarantine for five years because of the potential for the semen to have come from rams carrying scrapie.

PPL had 147 transgenic animals in March 1999, when it received Erma approval to breed up to 10,000 sheep as a commercial flock on two farms.

When the PPL bubble burst last June it had 17 New Zealand employees - nine farmhands and eight administrative staff, and a 170ha farm.

Former prime minister Jim Bolger - who chairs a policy thinktank involved in biotechnology - has said that by the time its fortunes collapsed in June last year PPL had bred more than 3500 transgenic sheep.

The original Erma approval of the project required all biological matter to be destroyed at the end of the research project.

Mr Bolger has criticised this constraint for preventing any of the tissues, embryos, semen or vital organs from being stored for further research purposes.

But Mrs Bleakley, a strong critic of farming GE livestock, has questioned whether some traces of the engineered sheep may remain, such as in altered DNA from the animals or their ashes, which have been taken up by soil organisms, or in the infective prions which transmit scrapie.

She does not think Erma and its enforcement agency, MAF, should be allowed to sign off on the farm, effectively declaring it to be free of harmful organisms.

- NZPA