"Clean and Green" No More?

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The reason for this ignorance is not hard to find. The New Zealand farm press, these days largely owned by bean counters in Australia and heavily reliant on chemical/biotech industry advertising, criminally neglects the whole issue of GE failures and only grudgingly mentions organic agriculture despite the geometric growth of NZ organic exports over the past five years. A recent survey conducted by the South Island's Lincoln University found that the majority of Kiwi farmers surveyed were still sitting on the fence over the whole GE issue. More to the point, the Clark Government has just voted a further $80 million to biotech experiments, which includes the sum mentioned earlier for the human genes-into-cows absurdity.

Typically, any GE research application over the past five years has received millions in taxpayer dollars and farmers have been misled at every turn by biotech interests and politicians alike into thinking that GE is the wave of the future for farming. Government investment in biotech, after all, proves the point. Organic agriculture only received $300,000 from government in the same period! In fact organic agriculture, the only agricultural area in New Zealand showing huge growth and the only sector of the international produce market facing an insatiable demand is, by contrast, almost completely ignored in the very country which could most successfully link it to New Zealand's existing "Clean & Green" mythology. Unfortunately a general lack of political savvy in the NZ organics movement doesn't help matters, but that's another story.

The general apathy demonstrated by New Zealand's ruling Federated Farmers towards key GE issues is not, of course, shared by their cousins across the Tasman Sea, who have effectively obtained state-wide bans on GE crops everywhere but in Queensland and the Northern Territory. As much as anything else, this is probably a reflection of the fact that Aussie farmers are a lot better served by both their farmer organisations, their rural media and their state political machines.

New Zealand farmers should have made careful note of the negative reaction of Japanese importers to last June's discovery that a NZ sweet corn shipment was contaminated with GE corn. But they all seem to have been asleep at the wheel when the news came through. Japan and the European Union, our other major customer for non-GE farm produce, told New Zealand years ago that their consumers wanted only guaranteed non-GE produce and this country with its narrow agricultural littorals and steady winds is probably the worst location in the world for maintaining segregation zones between organic and conventional crops and their GE equivalents. We simply cannot guarantee GE-free status of a conventional or organic crop once we permit planting of its GE equivalent. Wind-blown GE pollen and seed dispersal is even more likely in NZ than on the prairies of North America where it has already made the growing of organic or conventional canola and -- probably, ultimately -- corn and soya, impossible.

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