"Clean and Green" No More?

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But it's a comment on a national malaise that has bewildered overseas visitors whenever they come up against it -- a dumb evasion of intellectually demanding issues coupled to grovelling acceptance of undemocratic Government diktats -- that best explains why New Zealanders will ultimately let Helen Clark have her way and see this country totally cave in to corporate biotech demands for open-slather GE planting.

I'd like to think it could be different, but 40 years of activism on social and environmental issues tells me that New Zealand politicians in particular never learn and the colonial cringe that sees us always bend eventually to North American corporate-led paternalism will see our "Clean & Green" mythology crumble into the dust where it probably belongs.

When all is said and done, the reality at an agricultural level in New Zealand has been that we readily embraced chemical farming, including the most carcinogenic pesticides (and their consequences!), when American corporates offered it to us once before and we will do the same thing again -- unquestioningly -- now that those same corporates are offering us GE crops. Unfortunately for commonsense, as well as intelligence, there is neither the political will nor the support from the bulk of New Zealand's conservative farming community to do anything else.

Chris Wheeler is the former head of New Zealand's foremost organic farm lobbying group, the Soil and Health Association.

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