"Clean and Green" No More?

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That status may not last much longer, however. The manner in which the GE issue in New Zealand has caught the imagination of the thinking portion of the population has surprised even this critic, with grass roots opposition to GE spreading rapidly from professional bodies such as Physicians and Scientists for Responsible Genetics and the talent-heavy Sustainability Council (including ex-national farmers' head Sir Peter Elworthy and Hollywood star Sam Neill) to the high-profile Mothers Against Genetic Engineering (MADGE), which recently grabbed public attention by demonstrating in fluorescent pink bras in Parliament's debating chamber.

As I was just about to post this story MADGE has shocked even wider debate -- this time over the $26.4 million of public money voted towards GE research involving the insertion of human genes into cows -- by bill-boarding and postering the main centres with the provocative image of a nude MADGE member with genetically engineered multiple breasts attached to a milking machine!

The Government's case for GE hasn't been helped by recent news that Denmark is moving to ban glyphosate/Roundup in agriculture due to residues of that chemical with its known cancer link now being present in that nation's artesian water supply. Many NZ communities draw their water from aquifers where glyphosate and other leaching pesticides are popular and tests in the early '90s indicated pesticide contamination in all the main underground water sources. Glyphosate resistance is, of course, the chief selling point in the proposed GE crops, including the recently proposed (by state quango Crop & Food Research) GE onions that NZ taxpayer money is funding, but the international evidence from more than eight years of glyphosate-resistant GE crops indicates that not only do weeds become resistant to it (and all the other favoured herbicides), but that all-round pesticide use actually increases rather than decreases, contradicting the main selling point for GE crops in the first place, i.e. low pesticide use.

So Helen Clark is buying into a fight that is going to cost her dearly. We've already seen Auckland's main street packed end to end with over 50,000 demonstrators against GE -- something that hasn't been seen in New Zealand since the unemployment riots of the Great Depression. And, this week (October 11), further demonstrations with all the sophisticated Internet-savvy pre-planning of the Seattle and Genoa anti-WTO confrontations will be taking place in all the main centres on both islands and sending an even stronger message to the Clark Government that its rigid position in favour of GE is unacceptable. With even normally conservative opposition leaders like NZ First's Winston Peters speaking out in favour of a further five-year moratorium on GE field releases, PM Clark and her unheeding cabinet would do well to start listening now, before they lose electoral confidence and deal a death blow to the last sector of the national economy that still makes real money for the country -- agriculture, which, bolstered by a heavily promoted "Clean & Green" image based on conventional and organic production methods, contributes 75 percent of annual export earnings.

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