The latest New Zealand Environmental Protection Authority (NZEPA) Board are tasked with the oversight of a regulatory institution that has been backsliding for decades.
Overlapping issues have resulted in an industry-facing agency, a broad spectrum of problems that this article aims to traverse. There’s New Zealand’s poor history of environmental monitoring of industrial, agricultural and wastewater chemicals. Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are imported in human food and animal feed, but not generally monitored. Then there’s science funding policies, with pitiful long-term funding for local researchers and scientists to monitor and analyse risk from chemicals and GMOs, but which incentivise Crown Research Institutes to prioritise commercial or narrowly framed priorities.
With monitoring and research science hamstrung, there are no feedback loops into the NZEPA, and precious few scientists with the research data and expertise who might counter the NZEPA position on toxics.
This blinkers the NZEPA from domestic impacts of the chemicals it stewards. The NZEPA then defers to offshore regulators and industry (applicant) data for insight on what is risky and what is not. We follow Australia who tends to imitate North American decisions.
The new Board are about to be faced with an all-out assault on New Zealand’s current GMO regulations which biotech and GMO developers claim are ‘outdated and not fit for purpose’. This conversation doesn’t concern lab-based GMO development, but outdoor releases of GMOs.
Without a deeper exploration of what New Zealand-based risk entails, and clarity on what global best practice is, the NZEPA will naturally pivot to imitate decisions made in the United States. The U.S. is one of the weakest GMO regulatory jurisdictions in the world. We already tend to lag just behind the U.S. with pesticides regulation.
The ‘outdated’ calls predominantly come from certain politicians, or industry actors with skin in the game, such as potential patents on agricultural organisms.
Domestically owned quality food exporters have not been quite as energetic. Perhaps it is because consumers will actively pay more for non-GMO food, and that weakening our GMO laws might send a negative message to premium markets. The public understands that European food is safer and better regulated than U.S. food. There is an opportunity for New Zealand to reflect European values of quality and integrity. The NZEPA is often decades behind banning pesticides that are banned in Europe.
The effect is an unrealistic and somewhat hypocritical expectation – the desire that export markets view our exported foods as best quality – but we defer to weaker jurisdictions before we regulate or ban.
Will we turn to Europe – or will we imitate the United States?
How can we get around this with GMOs? With limited resources and no monitoring, it may make sense to harmonise (as a minimum) with the jurisdiction that has the most rigorous parameters around the definition of a new gene edited technology. If New Zealand adhered to European parameters, our regulatory standards would automatically be stricter, more transparent and more trustworthy than the U.S..
These are challenges and questions that the Board members must separately inform themselves of. The Board and NZEPA staff have an obligation to steward resources for future generations and protect the health and safety of people and the environment.
If I look at the make-up of the board, and the NZEPA’s functions and duties under law, there is a disconnect. I am not sure there is the expertise to identify and judge these long-term stewardship issues which impact the NZEPA’s capacity to effectively furthering the objectives and purposes of the legislation that gives it it’s powers. Governance must encompass public law principles.
A Board of Directors is in place to ensure that organisations function effectively. Day-to-day operations and strategic long-range planning need to reflect organisational goals and priorities.
Half of the new appointees have firm relationships with the science institutions who are currently lobbying for deregulation of gene edited technologies into the environment. In the overall board, there is lower representation of our key food export industries who gain from New Zealand’s image of high-quality food production. Sound regulation promotes trust in premium export markets. Board members solely reflecting environmental and Māori perspectives total one.
Not one Board member’s career has centred around environmental risk and toxics governance.
There is stronger scientific expertise in the pro-biotech deregulation corner.
But the contradiction is that our $53 billion agricultural export market benefits from New Zealand being globally recognised as producer of top-quality food and fibre.
Our media has been keener to communicate how outdated our GMO regulations laws are, and less likely to acknowledge scientific research that consistently shows that people from Japan to Vietnam, to France and the USA, to Australia, to Russia to China, actively pay a premium for non-GMO food. Our media is keener to offer hypothetical scenarios around gene editing benefits, and less enthusiastic about critically asking how and why we might benefit from process-based regulation, when we export so much food, and when our indigenous species are as rare and unique as they are.
We’re good at spruiking innovation, but not so good at considering the off-target and polluting impacts of those same innovations. Stewardship concerns preventing harm arising in the long and short term.
The Board’s obligations
The NZEPA is charged with undertaking functions in such a way that ‘contributes to the efficient, effective, and transparent management of New Zealand’s environment and natural and physical resources’. When undertaking functions under the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (HSNO) Act, the NZEPA must further the objectives and purposes of that Act.
When making decisions about toxic chemicals and genetically modified organisms the NZEPA has a duty to ‘protect the environment, and the health and safety of people and communities, by preventing or managing the adverse effects of hazardous substances and new organisms.’ The obligation extends to protecting future generations, and requires that the NZEPA take into account economic and related benefits and costs of using a particular substance or biotechnology.
NZEPA staff and the board must take a ‘precautionary approach’ and ‘shall take into account the need for caution in managing adverse effects where there is scientific and technical uncertainty about those effects.’
With these legislative obligations in mind, while we often think about regulators such as the NZEPA as being about ‘what the science says’, it is much harder than that.
The Board are not charged with ‘doing’ science. As Directors tasked with oversight of a government authority, they must recognise that processes within that agency must reflect public law principles of fairness and transparency, and that ensure that its actions are not biased towards particular interests. Their oversight can extend to ensuring that decision-making processes lead to robust decisions that protect the environment.
Regulatory agencies are tasked with approving or prohibiting commercial goods. Their activities include pre-market assessment, risk assessment and the setting of controls. Global sales of pesticides are US$45.7 billion per annum, while the global value of the biotechnology market which extends from healthcare to agriculture, sits at US$1.55 trillion. The global pesticides market is dominated by several huge companies. Most of the information for risk assessment is supplied by these industries.
Regulatory decision-making revolves around methods, protocols and guidelines that staff follow, when making decisions around a chemical or biotechnology’s safety. Values are always at the heart of these processes. Is epidemiological evidence considered? Are studies on formulation toxicity accepted? What happens when there are commercial releases at scale? Sometimes the protocols and guidelines get locked in for a very long time, and prioritise industry data, and write out non-industry data.
Protocols and guidelines are therefore highly political and often contested. As former chief science advisor Peter Gluckman has noted, ‘virtually all policy making carries complexity risk and uncertainty: But perceptions of complexity, risk, cost and benefit vary between stakeholders. They set the values around what decisions are taken.’
From science advice to cost versus benefit, there is often little discussion concerning the capacity for highly motivated institutions with financial conflicts of interest, to shape boundary functions over the long term and ensure the regulations do not create barriers to market entry for their products.
Gluckman is still not talking about resourcing science for monitoring. The scalar impact of GMOs and pesticides is a global problem:
The increasing rate of production and releases of larger volumes and higher numbers of novel entities with diverse risk potentials exceed societies’ ability to conduct safety related assessments and monitoring.
Regulatory agencies sit in the science advice ecosystem. Their difficult job is to sustain public trust, while regulating technologies that, depending on their persistence, bioaccumulation and toxicity, may harm the public and the environment.
Failure for a regulatory agency that is responsible for making sure people are not exposed to toxic chemicals and GMOs is different from a corporation, where failure is most frequently tied to a balance sheet. People cannot test their food and water for toxic chemicals, and scan their food for GMOs, nor identify when herbicides were sprayed in parks and along roads to protect their children.
GMOS – The known unknowns and the unknown unknowns
Science Minister Judith Collins, and the National-led government have stated that they intend to deregulate our laws around GMOs. Collins has stated that ‘New Zealand has lagged behind countries, including Australia, England, Canada and many European nations in allowing the use of this technology for the benefit of their people, and their economies’.
Collins has failed to clarify that neither Europe nor Australia have yet to fully adopt new GMO laws which are as radical as her proposal. Collins is probably not aware despite twenty years of government investment in GMO research and development, the government is yet to assess the return on investment.
There’s a strange cognitive dissonance surrounding Australia and New Zealand when it comes to the current industry campaign to lower barriers to environmental releases of GMOs.
The Government claims it wants to reduce barriers to releases into New Zealand environment, hoping that gene edited organisms will help with sustainability and climate goals. As Jack Heinemann has explained, after 20+ years of deregulation in North America, notable progress on sustainability and climate have not been achieved with GMOs. The major crops have herbicide tolerance (HT) traits. Herbicides can drift, harming people and ecosystems.
Many GMO crops authorised in Europe are tolerant to herbicides, including glyphosate, dicamba and glufosinate that are prohibited or not permitted to be sprayed onto food crops, often due to toxicity and groundwater risk. Ultimately, despite authorisations, Europe has been hesitant to grow GMO crops, with only five EU countries growing GM maize – Spain, Portugal, Czech Republic, Romania and Slovakia.
Drought tolerance has not been achieved. Despite recent claims about a new gene edited wheat, when planted across Argentina, yields were found to be 17% lower than yields from traditional wheat varieties.
Connected issue – is our food authority caving to industry demands?
When it comes to gene edited foods, some gene edited foods may evade regulation because government and industry scientists claim that they are substantially equivalent to conventionally bred foods. In a recent consultation the Food Safety Authority Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) proposed that if a gene edited food had novel DNA inserted into it, and the organisms could then produce novel protein/s, it would be designated as GMO. If not, the patented GMO products would evade pre-market assessment, and quite likely evade labelling laws (unless FSANZ adopted stronger regulations – of the form seen in Europe).
A European study found that the new definition would eliminate 94% of current GMO/gene-editing applications, creating a tsunami of GMOs that bypass regulatory risk assessment.
FSANZ strategy is to ignore all the unintended consequences from alterations to plant genomes, if they don’t fit their narrow definition which demands novel DNA or a novel protein is present.
‘Novel DNA’ isn’t just added foreign DNA. FSANZ wants us to believe that is the exclusive definition. But in reality, novel DNA encompasses any sequence of nucleotides that wasn’t previously in an organism. For example, if AATCGTC was just changed to ATAGTC, this would represent a novel sequence of nucleotides regardless of whether it was created by inserting a new piece of DNA or editing it to that sequence.
But somehow, according to FSANZ, the foreign sequence that is added, is in scope, and the sequence from that species that is edited without added DNA is not in scope. This is the sleight of hand that might result in a massive range of GMOs being excluded from being categorised as a GMO.
I don’t believe FSANZ is impartial in this matter. I believe that it is biased towards a particular predetermined goal that directly contradicts regulatory objectives. In PSGRNZ’s submission to FSANZ, we expressed deep concern that the food safety regulator would again, the third time in a row, fail to disclose the balance of opinion from submitters concerning whether they agreed with, or didn’t – the FSANZ consultation proposal.
Of course, the balance of opinion is not a legislated obligation. But there is now long-term evidence that FSANZ have been sidelining scientific and risk-based information presented to them, that contradicts their current substantial equivalence trajectory.
Creating policy-relevant information that then persuades politicians to change current laws, without including information that contradicts FSANZ current trajectory, looks rather misleading and deceptive.
When government agencies barricade inwards and patently advocate for the very same solutions industry demands, perhaps politicians have to look beyond them for input that might reflect the broader public interest.
I discuss the FSANZ proposal, because what if NZEPA say the same applies to GMOs used in agriculture and in the environment? That a GMO will only be classified a GMO if it contains foreign novel DNA, claiming deregulation is required to fulfil environmental goals?
New Zealand laws will risk assess a product based on when it was developed using genetic modification (gene edited organisms are GMOs), including when the modification arises from insertion of DNA from other species, or is a novel DNA sequence created by gene editing.
This process based approach is important in a dynamic, quickly evolving technology field, where production of modified organisms can reach industrial scales for broad release into the environment.
Inclusion and exclusion criteria shapes whether a GMO is legally defined as a GMO. What triggers regulatory inclusion? By eliminating process as the regulatory trigger, an enormous swathe of GMOs will be excluded from regulatory risk assessment.
Deregulation can occur in a number of ways:
Deregulation of something that was previously regulated can be achieved by defining it out of scope (exclusion) or by defining it out of regulations (exemption). Similarly, deregulation of certain ways to alter genetic material unnaturally may be carried out either by excluding those specific ways from the definition of a GMO or by exempting them from the regulations.
Known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns
Donald Rumsfeld’s famous quote applies in this world where technology can scale rapidly into the environment. Risk assessment is a short- and long game. Risk assessment is in place to not only identify hazards, the potential of an organism to cause harm to human health and/or the environment; but consider risk, the likelihood of a harm to occur and the severity of the estimated damage over time.
The scale and pace of potential releases cannot be ignored and downplayed by the Board and NZEPA staff amid a global biotechnology revolution where laboratories can swiftly scale up, where there is a proliferation of patent licensing, and pressure to achieve a ‘faster development rate from bench to market’. Intellectual property rights are stronger for food produced using biotechnology, than for conventional breeding.
What happens if the New Zealand government loosens our regulations, and particular genes in a GMO (such as ryegrass) are found only 2-5 years later to be cross-contaminating conventional varieties?
What happens if a gene edited food product fits into a ‘non-GMO’ class, but in a few years the changes to the genome were found to be so considerable, that a plant which was selected for productivity traits, ends up being far less palatable, less nutritious, and more invasive than varieties preferred by farmers and growers?
Australia and New Zealand have always prioritised biosecurity. Lots of investment and lots of tracking and tracing is required. Unwanted and introduced insects and weed species can rapidly get out of control.
But – ironically – the potential for GMOs to produce off-target and even harmful effects in future is not a biosecurity risk? The potential for industrial releases at scale is not to be considered a biosecurity threat?
As PSGRNZ discussed, FSANZ’s substantial equivalence claims are based on argumentative text, not an analytical review of the scientific literature, to shape what seems to be a predetermined conclusion. It seems that when non-industry aligned scientists look, they find evidence that contradicts the substantial equivalence claims made by government regulators.
From proteomics analysis which find altered proteins, to research showing that an intended CRISPR-Cas-9 knockout can result in domino-like structural changes in chromosomes, to accidental deletions or how a temporarily inserted transgene might produce an array of new point mutations, including in the coding sequence of genes, with potential to impact the functioning of genes and proteins. Then there is gene silencing to risk from emissions to wastewater from edited organisms used as feedstock in industrial food production.
It’s essential that all Board members grasp the risks arising from penetration technologies. These allow gene silencing and genome editing, in situ – out in the environment. Penetration technologies create known and unknown scalar risks. Industrial outdoor applications of gene editing have the worrying potential, domino-like, to alter the genomes of non-target organisms at scale.
Then there is the risk to conventional breeders as industry patents accrue across a species. For example, where common foods such as wheat, tomatoes or apples become widely patented. Conventional breeders can be required to make royalty payments, should they want to cross-breed and produce a new variety.
It’s very likely if Board members are involved in biotech already, they’ll have some knowledge. But those that aren’t risk being blindsided by ‘expert’ claims that ignore these uncertainties.
Backsliding on toxic chemicals
How does backsliding occur with regards to toxic chemicals? The NZEPA persistently turn to weaker regulatory regimes to guide their actions. When making regulatory decisions over the past twenty years, the NZEPA will predominantly cite for example, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, or decisions made by the World Health Organization and Food and Agriculture Organization Joint Meeting on Pesticides Residues – following Australia’s lead.
The NZEPA recently declined a request for the first risk assessment of glyphosate in around 40 years. The NZEPA stated that they don’t usually look at the scientific literature:
‘When processing a reassessment, literature reviews are not usually used to justify changes to the hazard classification or controls of an approval.’
NZEPA then cite a recent European review. But European regulators permit peer-reviewed literature inclusion in risk assessment, somewhat contradicting NZEPA’s blinkered approach. The European Food Safety Authority states that:
Scientific peer-reviewed open literature, […], on the active substance and its relevant metabolites dealing with side-effects on health, the environment and non-target species and published within the last ten years before the date of submission of the dossier…”
When it comes to glyphosate’s safety, NZEPA lean on the European assessment without disclosing just how different New Zealand-European regulations around glyphosate are.
Europe’s glyphosate controls are much stricter. Europe has been adjusting their controls over time. Europe’s glyphosate approval doesn’t extend to the spraying of glyphosate on food crops, down roads and in towns and parks. In contrast, NZEPA permissions do extent to these uses. Europe’s representative uses extend to:
‘uses pre-sowing, pre-planting and pre-emergence plus post-harvest in vegetables and sugar beet; post-emergence of weeds in orchards, vineyards, row vegetables, railway tracks against emerged annual, biennial and perennial weeds.’
But NZEPA haven’t differentiated these uses which increase exposures far more to the public, than, for example sprays used to prepare land for crops.
In NZEPA’s document declining a review of glyphosate, the NZEPA also emphasised risk assessment methodology which incorporates the Klimisch score and GLP, good laboratory practice guidelines which they pretend ensures that studies are valid and robust. GLP was solely introduced to reduce fraud, yet can be gamed by companies. The Klimisch criteria was recommended by chemical company employees and struggles to deal with low-dose, hormonally relevant exposures.
NZEPA don’t tend to harmonise with European regulations which are stricter, even though, for example, we produce kiwifruit and other crops outside of Europe’s growing season. Harmonisation would send a global message and support sustainability goals. Educational extension services could underpin this shift.
New Zealand is increasingly selected by the pesticides industry to approve a new formulation. Our weak regulatory jurisdiction ensures that we are a low barrier to entry. This is for example, why we sell much more concentrated formulations of glyphosate herbicide than permitted in Europe. The NZEPA has historically not taken swift action to ban pesticides in groundwater like Europe has.
The NZEPA conduct proxy consultations which have the impact of pushing risk assessments into the future. They have conducted a ‘Call for Information’ for both glyphosate and neonicotinoids. Once the information comes in, they adopt a ‘he said – she said approach’. NZEPA downplayed the nagging problem of glyphosate tolerance in weeds by resorting to the industry claim that ‘glyphosate helps manage resistance’.
Neonicotinoid insecticides are persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic, and are well established drivers of pollinator decline, and are firmly regulated in Europe. The EPA have been timidly sitting on a potential risk assessment for neonicotinoids for four years.
To navigate around herbicide resistance (which is worse than previously thought), farmers and growers combine herbicides and adjuvants in tank mixes. Exposures are common as applicators take off their protective gloves to answer a phone, eat lunch and drive the car, and unintentional poisoning is relatively common.
The NZEPA neither monitors these mixtures nor assesses them for toxicity – in applicators or into the environment. It is this formulation that is released into the environment.
Navigating herbicide tolerance has been the job of new Board member Alison Stewart’s organisation, the Foundation for Arable Research (FAR), where Stewart is chief executive. But their funding is short term and narrow. There’s been no big central government funding parcels to get into non-chemical integrated pest management (IPM) weed management in a big way. Reducing or eliminating herbicide (for weeds) and pesticides (such as for mites, moulds, and insects) dependence is informationally complex, and could involve robotics, rotation strategies, and electrical weeding solutions.
Long-term government funding for IPM, to review the global literature, for farm extension services encouraging information flows, crosstalk between farmers, growers research scientists and developers is required. As long as this is drip-fed and project scopes are limited, the arable community, from cereal cropping to vegie growers, will defend the use of all pesticides, their economic life depends on it.
The largest beneficiaries of this information deficit, are the transnational chemical and biopesticide companies.
NZEPA’s recent panic about the pesticide DCPA highlighted our long history of only acting if the U.S. does. The U.S. finally decided it was bad last month. But Europe banned the toxic substance in 2009.
New Zealand has a terrible record of failing to ban chemicals that are banned or heavily controlled in Europe, usually once groundwater is threatened. There are many European-banned substances in New Zealand rivers and streams. A selection of such chemicals banned in Europe but not here include:
Mancozeb, paraquat, chlorpyrifos, methyl bromide, hydrogen cyanimide, hexazinone, terbacil, atrazine, haloxyfop-P, thiram, methomyl, carbaryl, diazinon, dichlorvos, 1080, brodifacoum flamprop-M-isopropyl, isoproturon, fenitrothion, Iprodione, Methamidophos.
We could be tracking with Europe, but we track to weaker regulators.
Then there is the case of the NZEPA simply stepping away from doing important work. A precautionary approach is embedded in their legislation. But there are no policy papers or guidelines to support officials to take a precautionary approach when there is a lack of scientific certainty but a threat of harm. However, perplexingly, the Attorney-General Judith Collins may be spearheading the removal of precaution:
‘Official documents from the Ministry for the Environment (MfE) from a meeting in June, chaired by Science and Technology Minister Judith Collins, say it was agreed the legislation should not include a reference to the precautionary approach and ethics should be excluded from consideration.’
Recent Fluoride has been emitted into wastewater for 40 years, but the NZEPA has never conducted environmental risk assessment of fluoride or the slurry that is added to municipal water.
You can’t manage what you don’t measure
It makes sense that New Zealand would lag when it comes to restricting chemicals used to support our $53 billion agricultural export market.
We’re blinkered by an absence of informational crosstalk between agencies. Scientific research to assess the toxicity of pesticides in humans and in the environment is negligible. No-one is monitoring for contaminant chemicals trace heavy metals, or if they do, they’re unlikely to review the potential toxic impact. Then when research is undertaken, it is ignored by the NZEPA unless the U.S. or Australia is moving this way, anyway.
There is no feedback loop into the NZEPA from the ESR or from Regional Councils, the main institutions that could undertake monitoring and shed light on environmental chemical contamination.
Crown Research Institute ESR is funded to test groundwater levels of toxic chemicals and more recently the PFAS group. But their funding, for example, doesn’t stretch to examining the class-based impact when multiple chemicals for one chemical class (for example the triazine class) accumulates in water and sediment around (for example) forestry regions.
ESR certainly won’t be feeding into the NZEPA ecosystem to warn officials about the presence of toxic pesticides, their role is limited to screening, not assessing for risk.
Nor will Regional Councils. The National Policy on Freshwater (NPS-FM) guidelines steer officials towards our national freshwater narrative – where sediment, bacteria and nutrients are the environmental culprits. When the NPS-FM was being developed, PSGRNZ joined with many organisations came together to try to get public attention on the toxic chemicals gap. Despite media releases being sent out, our appeals asking that this gap be addressed were ignored.
There is no doubt that the small range of attributes which include phytoplankton, E. coli, nitrogen, phosphorous and nitrate that have to be screened for, represent risks to water health. But agricultural, industrial and wastewater chemicals pollute water too.
We were concerned, back in 2019, that if water health was declining, that there was no policy to step councils into a suite of screens for toxic chemicals and heavy metals to assess what might be driving that decline. Then the new Natural and Built Environments Act 2023 ignored chemical pollution as well.
A recent ESR statement around macroinvertebrates and microbial diversity suggests that they will follow the same path. ESR is now, ironically ‘busy establishing a groundwater health index focused on the presence of macroinvertebrates in groundwater and microbial diversity’. ESR might have reams of data on pesticide aggregation in groundwater but they’re certainly not considering whether the mixtures and synergies are inhibiting the small invertebrates at the start of the food chain. It’s simply, not in scope.
Monitoring and basic science kneecapped by MBIE
The NZEPA Board probably does not know that there is not a single scientist in New Zealand outside of the NZEPA with the freedom and funding to research pesticides and risk – either to the applicators (the sprayers), the soil or waters and the sediment where chemicals can bioaccumulate. Studies such as this one showing a wide range of banned chemicals in New Zealand streams, or this one looking at neonicotinoid levels in agricultural soil, are as rare as hen’s teeth.
As author Chris Pook stated: ‘you can’t manage what you don’t measure.’
The Board probably won’t know that many crucial recommendations from the 2001 Royal Commission (RC) have been discarded. The RC recommended a three-pronged approach including the establishment of a Parliamentary Commissioner on Biotechnology, a Bioethics Council and a biotechnology strategy. None of these initiatives are in operation in 2024.
New Zealand authorities have stepped away from screening conventional food and crop seed to ensure that GMO do not contaminate food supplies. However, without monitoring, if foreign jurisdictions identify GMO contamination, the reputational decline can be felt across industry sectors.
Our lack of independent funding to monitor for contamination and research risk, sets New Zealand up for such transgressions.
If Board members review articles advocating for relaxing New Zealand’s laws to make it easier to release gene edited technologies into the environment, you’ll find that New Zealand’s Crown Research Institutes (CRIs) and their scientists, head the charge.
Scientists from cash-strapped Crown Research Institutes such as AgResearch and Scion, and our universities, which have long faced dwindling funding for basic research.
The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment’s (MBIE) science policy and funding opportunities effectively negate scope for long-term basic and applied research into risks from technologies, pollution and contamination. MBIE’s science advisory group are tasked to ‘solutionising’, not towards firstly, gathering intelligence.
As I’ve discussed, this limits scientific freedom. If scientists do get funding for basic science, there has to be an applied angle, such as the promise of a patent at the end of it. In such environments, scientists are unlikely to stick their heads above any parapets and engage in politically risky research.
Alternatively, CRIs and universities can secure private public partnerships which is unlikely to fund research into human or environmental health risks from technologies. The pivot to biotech has dovetailed with these aims, as innovations in biotech yield patents and royalties, i.e. an income.
Unfortunately, this means that when you read a paper or listen to an interview talking about the need to the need to deregulate, there is a fair chance the expert who is interviewed will be from a CRI.
As ‘innovation’ has become the clarion call for science, CRIs have pivoted to focus on identified problems using biotechnology and gene editing techniques which likely result in a patent, and royalties. It is difficult to secure patents from nutritional research, or IPM, and toxic residues are not an identified problem. Our science and research systems are all the poorer for it.
The NZ EPA Board refresh
Environment Minister Penny Simmonds has just announced a major refresh of the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) board with four new appointments and one reappointment.
Of the six board members, only one, Nancy Tuaine (MBA), chief executive officer of Ngā Tāngata Tiaki o Whanganui, could be said to have a dedicated interest in environmental protection. Chartered accountant Paul Connell is a professional director and acting chair. He has a background in risk identification in the road transport, electricity distribution sectors and at Hamilton City Council.
The other four are agriculture focussed. Jen Scoular retired last year as chief executive of New Zealand Avocado, held the position of Treasurer for Zespri International and has a strong trade background.
The three board members that have science backgrounds are firmly entrenched in the agricultural industry. Barry O’Neill (veterinary medicine) is the board chair for Horticulture New Zealand and chair of TomatoesNZ. Ex-Scion scientist Alison Stewart (PhD in plant pathology) heads up the Foundation for Arable Research. Stewart was previously deputy chair of Plant & Food Research. Mary-Anne Mc Leod (MSc in earth sciences and geography) is a board director of AgResearch and NIWA.
Then when you consider the backgrounds and associations of the NZEPA board members, their long-term relationships might indicate where their priorities and focus lies.
Two members have close relationships with CRIs Scion and AgResearch, which have a portfolio of gene edited products in the pipeline. Relaxing the laws around gene editing would enable bigger and larger trials and releases for these CRIs.
Two members have strong links with food exporters who trade on New Zealand’s clean, green image. As I have discussed, globally, people will pay more for GMOs. The non-GMO market is thriving. People really don’t want to go near gene-edited meat.
The Board are also watching over a timid environmental authority that is hesitant to ban any chemical unless buddy U.S. acts first. An authority who has failed to demand feedback from independent researchers on the products it approves for release into the environment. An authority that blithely ignored the jettisoning of most of the recommendations made by the Royal Commission twenty years ago, which were intended to ensure that biotechnology could be safely stewarded over the long term.
The NZEPA might have a mighty purpose: ‘to protect the environment, and the health and safety of people and communities, by preventing or managing the adverse effects of hazardous substances and new organisms’ but it’s activities suggest the demeanour of a politically captured organisation.
It’s the old – it’s not what you say, it’s what you do.
Any pivot to a stricter and safety regulatory regime would be a struggle.
Then – in the political mix – we have the National Party and Attorney-General Judith Collins ‘promise’ of GMO deregulation while they patently fail to discuss food export priorities and consumer preferences.
Add to this, the white papers drafted by powerful management consultancies. KPMG’s 2024 Agribusiness Agenda emphasises how important the deregulation of gene editing is in New Zealand. The industry-networker Aotearoa Circle and innovation funder AGMARDT engaged PwC to enthuse about the socio-economic considerations and craft case studies relating to climate, agriculture, sustainability, biodiversity which are designed to manufacture societal consent to overcome public resistance. The PwC future scenarios build in cases acknowledging that consumers prefer non-GMO but that if products are ‘unlabelled are likely to experience no change in value perception’:
Unless New Zealand’s key export markets require labelling of products created with new genome techniques, it is unlikely consumers would be able to identify (and therefore assign any difference in value) between GM and non-GM products. For products labelled as GM, discounting could be expected, meaning non-GM products would enjoy a relative premium.
The funding for these agribusiness reviews is available, because the management consultancies partner with transnational corporations. They ask us to conflate some sort of inferred benefit to domestically owned small and medium-sized farmers and growers across New Zealand, without delving deeply into facts which might contradict their claims, including patent ownership and traceability burdens.
Stewarding New Zealand without a ‘race to the bottom’
With limited resources, it may make sense to harmonise with the jurisdiction that has the most rigorous parameters around the definition of a new gene edited technology. If New Zealand adhered to European parameters, our regulations would automatically then harmonise with most countries globally.
The public understands that European food is safer and better regulated than U.S. food. There is an opportunity for New Zealand to reflect European values of quality and integrity.
Recently, European regulations on gene edited organisms have shifted, but look under the bonnet and you’ll see a lot more to the regulatory engine than what we see in the U.S.. Europe is still the strongest jurisdiction, and their decision is in no way locked in. We may see countries separately announcing stricter policies.
We can pivot to Europe – and we don’t need to deregulate in a heady rush.
New Zealand has a looming change in regulation. If they were acting impartially, the NZEPA could have already conducted a situation analysis and review global risks and threats from environmental releases of GMOs, that might have reflected some of the uncertainties and risks outlined in this document.
This hasn’t been done. As we can see, our science research institutions are unlikely to step into the gap left by the NZEPA.
Such work would support public – and Board – understanding, of the implications of an immense barrage of patented products that could potentially come through the GMO pipeline and be released into the environment. Ignorance can play just as important a role as knowledge, when it comes to policy development and stewardship of human and environmental health.
Does the new Board have sufficient impartiality to support NZEPA to pivot away from the current backsliding? You be the judge.
There logo says it all if you replace the word protection with destroying.