Editorial: Tainted mainly by a word

Words are powerful weapons in any contest for public opinion. Ask the anti-GM campaign. It has been handed a howitzer with the application of the word "contaminated" to corn seeds bearing signs of genetic modification.

The term made its first public appearance in the explosive little book by environmentalist Nicky Hager that landed on the Labour Party's election campaign. Since then it has been liberally sprinkled through a succession of reports on admissions from seed merchants that the occasional shipment has been found with a degree of "GM contamination".

Mr Hager did not coin the word but he would have been delighted to find it in use among the bureaucrats who administer environmental regulations. He must have been doubly delighted to find Science Minister Pete Hodgson and others in the Government bandying the term about as they tried to defend a negligible level of "contamination".

A debate on those terms is one that science and reason cannot win. How many people will tolerate any contaminated foodstuffs in the national larder? But are these seeds contaminated in any ordinary meaning of the word? They are not unclean or in any sense unhealthy as far as anyone knows. They are not infected. There are no proven hazards; the anti-GM lobby has managed to have them banned for the time being as a precaution.

The "contaminant" is a gene from a soil bacterium that has a natural resistance to borer and other parasites. It enables the corn to survive those predators without the aid of chemical pesticides, which anti-GM people do not much like either. The bacterium forms a protein which is already in use as an insecticide spray. Bt11, as it is called, appears to pose no danger to humans or animals. The only common precaution, echoed by the Royal Commission on Genetic Modification, is that Bt modified plants should be limited to ensure that beneficial insects can find a refuge in other plants and the pests cannot develop a resistance to it.

But such is the political climate in this country that the regulators have a very low tolerance of Bt11, at least in genetic form. Seed growers, obliged to observe the regulations, find them ridiculous. As one of them, Rene Van Tilberg of Seed Solution, told the Herald: "We've done what we are required to do but it makes New Zealand look stupid to be taking it to this degree."

He had to destroy seed crops at Pukekohe and Gisborne because tests, rather mysteriously, showed slight genetic Bt "contamination" (less than 0.5 per cent) despite being grown from imported parent seed that tests had shown not to be genetically modified. The Australian supplier, Pacific Seeds, acquired them from two United States companies, neither of which, it says, was the one that produced the corn featured in the Hager book. The Green Party wants no more corn supplies from the US.

Meanwhile, Pacific Seeds says it will distribute no more seed in New Zealand this year and warns of shortages. And a New Zealand company admits it grew modified maize in Gisborne in the early 1990s before New Zealand's stringent regulations were adopted. A GM vegetable specialist for the Government's Crop and Food Research Institute, Dr Tony Conner, says we can expect more "contaminated" crops unless the border is closed to virtually all seed imports.

"The concept of absolutely zero GE content is almost certainly unachievable," he says. The royal commission noted that New Zealand is well placed to be a producer of contract seeds in time for other countries' growing seasons. That could be the true cost of a debate swayed by careless words.

nzherald.co.nz/ge

GE links

GE glossary