Editorial: Deceptive tactics by anti-GM lobby

The Green campaign against genetic modification is doing itself discredit with the claims it is making about the "decontamination" of soil at Kerikeri, where a crown research institute has grown an experimental crop of tamarillos. The institute, HortResearch, has evidently agreed to sterilise the site - not because there is the slightest evidence of contamination but to "appease" the anti-GM campaign and reassure those among the public who are susceptible to its scaremongering.

The word "appease" was used by the head of the Environmental Risk Management Authority, Dr Bas Walker, whose agency lays down the conditions under which experiments can proceed. Dr Walker is not the first person to discover the futility of an exercise in appeasement. Now that HortResearch has agreed to treat the soil, the Green Party and others have begun citing the decision as some sort of evidence of the dangers of genetic modification. It is nothing of the sort, and the public should be clear about that.

It is evidence, rather, of the deceptive tactics that opponents of genetic modification are prepared to use. This is by no means an isolated example. Their publications and websites are replete with stories of GM experiments gone awry. Several of them were wheeled up to New Zealand's recent royal commission, which painstakingly checked them out. One by one, the cases were either totally discredited or turned out to be tendentious half-truths.

Undeterred, the Greens are now hell-bent upon burying the royal commission's report. The story of the decontaminated tamarillo plot will no doubt take its place in the anti-GM folklore. The real danger, as highlighted in the Herald yesterday, is that it will harm the public perception of genetic modification just as the Government is preparing to announce its decisions on the recommendations of the royal commission.

There have been dismaying signs the Government will bend to pressure from the Greens, on whom it depends for a voting majority in Parliament, and reject the royal commission's advice that field trials of genetically modified crops should be permitted under careful conditions. If instead it decides a moratorium on field trials must continue indefinitely, the Government will make a travesty of the royal commission's work and stunt this country's agricultural and horticultural sciences.

The Kerikeri tamarillo crop looks to be exactly the sort of field trial the royal commission would allow to go ahead, and the subsequent sterilising of the soil is the kind of precaution the commission no doubt has in mind when it supports the controlled release of organisms. The commission heard that modified DNA in plants could be transferred to soil bacteria and then to other plants, though not much is known about how commonly that happens or what the effects may be.

Horizontal gene transfer, as it is called, is still under research. In the meantime, it is a reason to proceed with care - the sort of care to be taken at Kerikeri - not to freeze in fear. The fact that no effects have appeared in other plants after a good deal of genetic experimentation suggests there is not much to worry about.

There is probably more risk of harm from the common soil sterilising agent chloropicrin, to be used at Kerikeri, than from any DNA that may be carried by bacteria from the modified tamarillos. The agent will be applied under plastic to prevent the release of fumes, though the chemical has rarely caused ill-effects in humans. That, too, is a slight health hazard the Greens will blame on the genetic experiment.

Thankfully, we now have the commission's report to put things in perspective. Nobody who reads it can have any doubt that the members made an earnest, dispassionate effort to understand the risks and benefits of genetic modification and came to reasonable conclusions. It was exactly the exercise needed for those of us not well-versed in biological science.

The anti-GM lobby, by contrast, prefers to agitate for precautions and, once granted them, cites them as proof of danger. People should not be taken in.

nzherald.co.nz/ge

Report of the Royal Commission on Genetic Modification

GE lessons from Britain

GE links

GE glossary