When Sciencing is all we need

No wonder public trust in government is in freefall.

This week the Farmers Weekly in a poll asked readers ‘Should the government be showing more urgency with its changes at the Environmental Protection Authority?

The question should be – is there anything in the world that can stem the New Zealand Environmental Protection Authority’s (NZEPAs) decades-long backsliding?

But the NZEPA isn’t the only regulatory agency that is engaging in a little backsliding, it’s quite popular, actually. Who needs scientific process anyway when you can just invent papers that are science-like? Where officials are stuck in cultures that seem to only think about balancing opinions rather than assessing risk (like we trust them too)?

The context concerns outcomes that might arise following the Ministry for Regulations Agricultural and horticultural products regulatory review.

As I discussed previously, the  ag/hort regulatory review will focus on the assessment and approval process (approval path); the reassessment processes (including the thresholds for triggering reassessments); any overlap with the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (HSNO) Act 1996; as well as links and overlaps with offshore regulatory agencies.

It is likely that officials conducting the review will struggle to separate out the interests of the industrial chemical sector with the interests of New Zealand farmers and growers.

How we might understand the overlapping issues that officials might be challenged by?

• Is there any research funding for scientists to conduct serum testing and biomarker research to understand exposure rates of farmers and growers pesticide use over time, including exposures from different chemical solutions (including adjuvants) and associated inflammatory and oxidative stress pathways that could increase risk for a range of metabolic and mental disease conditions? No there is not.
• Is there research funding to assess New Zealand usage of pesticides including herbicides so that we can see how we align with other countries?
• Is there long-term funding to understand whether spraying of glyphosate based herbicides on aquatic weeds in waterways in the North and South Island have positive cost-benefit outcomes, leading to toxic sediment that impairs water quality and disrupts organism health in the aquatic food chain? No.

Understanding the extent to which soils, humans and waterways can degrade or bioaccumulate agricultural chemicals should be part of any good stewardship programme for a country exporting $54 billion of agricultural products. But this sort of work is outside the tightly framed national standards for freshwater, and government research on soil and human health is spotty and short-term.

As I stated:

If this agricultural and horticultural products regulatory review were undertaken in such a way as to meaningfully prevent or manage risks the review, officials need to dip their toes in a broader range of complex and overlapping issues far beyond the struggles corporate applicants have with New Zealand’s new product agriculture and horticulture approval process. …

Regulatory agencies rarely deviate from company claims relating to risk and economic benefit. Unfortunately, they don’t have the remit and resourcing to look too deeply. Their guidelines can lock in quaint modelling concepts, write out epidemiological evidence, ignore childhood risk and dismiss the toxicity of the full formulation that is central to the economic success of a compound.

It will likely fail because of the New Zealand government’s systemic failure to fund public good science which has effectively shrunk scientific freedom in New Zealand.

There is no doubt that Bayer retreating from scientific research (not from selling industrial and medical chemical products) is a blow for domestic scientific research. However, the Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) can turn around tomorrow, and improve funding for scientific research by stopping nailing our Crown Research Institutions and academic sector to the innovation cross – and actually extend funding for long-term public-good basic research.

Farmers and growers are castigated by the general public if they go astray and use too many chemicals – but MBIE simply doesn’t fund long-term research to track and update knowledge on soil health (from residue accumulation, to microbial communities, to assess mineral deficiencies and their relationships with plant and animal health and productivity) and to expand knowledge on low and non-chemical integrative pest management across horticulture, arable and pasture production.

These everyday challenges are not ‘innovative’ and outside funding scopes.

Because MBIE consistently fail, i.e. effectively refuse to put in place, long-term research funding pathways to document and understand relationships between soil health, changing weather patterns, livestock and/or pasture and/or arable nutrition, scientists have to then quietly ignore research ideas that might draw attention to the adverse effects of ‘innovations’.

Weird stuff can then happen. Scientists can end up substituting real data with modelling scenarios that might, sort of, perhaps, be OK. Then they have to chase patents to secure future funding routes through royalties, because funding can be so precarious.

So there is no way independent funding will be set aside to assess long-term risk to the ruminant microbiome from fiddling around with methane drugs and technologies.

MBIE secured their oversight over the entire science system funding through secondary legislation. Members of Parliament weren’t even given a chance to vote on how science might be stewarded for the public good.

Innovation promptly became the raison d’etre for the science funding, followed by ‘excellence’ which of itself, infers excellence in narrow disciplinary streams (like biotechnology) that promise patents; rather than cross-disciplinary research (like monitoring and basic research to understand productivity, disease resistance and fertility over time) that don’t promise patents.

It’s no wonder that in an under-resourced ‘innovation’ captured research environment, that the NZ EPA keep backsliding, failing to conduct risk assessment of glyphosate and being slow to assess well established toxic pesticides. No scientists in New Zealand are being funded to undertake work that could end up demanding the NZEPA step up, based on current scientific evidence.

It’s no wonder that New Zealand permits massively concentrated levels of glyphosate to be sold; and permits glyphosate sprays in public areas and direct sprays on food crops just prior to harvest (e.g. here and here and here). All farmers and chemical retailers recognise such well-timed sprays are a way to desiccate crops quickly, for example if rain is on its way. Semantics around explicit word use won’t write out this practice. Europe now discourages pre-harvest spraying and pre-harvest and public area spraying aren’t  ‘representative uses’ (page 8).

It’s no wonder the NZEPA have developed a silly 2022 methodology which of course, (unlike Europe), writes out epidemiological data and the scientific literature, and then depends on corporate applicant (chemical company) data and relies on antiquated models.

It’s no wonder that the funder of research for biotech patents, MBIE, then want to also secure control of the legislation and regulations which then enables those patents to be released on to the market. Totally without conducting any form of risk assessment or cost-benefit analysis.

NZEPA is not the only regulatory agency falling apart at the seams.  

On 4 June 2025, the FSANZ Board approved Proposal P1055 to amend the definitions for genetically modified (GM) food in the Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code (the Code) to their predetermined outcome which would result in genetically modified (GM) foods that are gene edited but do not fall into a predetermined criteria, not being called GMO because apparently such an idea is ‘outdated’.

The consultation has failed to focus on consumer safety and completely ignored that the amendment directly contradicts their own obligation to ensure:

‘provision of adequate information relating to food to enable consumers to make informed choices’

… their own legislation. The new legislation would enable a large spectrum of gene edited foods to avoid being tracked, monitored and labelled. No scientifically rigorous risk assessment here either. New Zealand food Ministers now have 60 days to consider FSANZ’s decision.

FSANZ decision follows years of the (what I now call) scientific shell game where white paper after white paper is published, none of which follow any semblance of regulatory protocol or scientific protocol, but they then form a stack of references for policy purposes.  So at no stage was there ever impartial and rigorous assessment of potential risks and costs versus benefits by FSANZ – (just like MBIE’s no-risk-assessment game with the Gene Technology Bill): where questions are presented throughout the policy process which effectively steer decisions towards a predetermined outcome and where the agency fails to disclose how many submissions to processes actively critiqued a proposal.

The more inadequate and outdated New Zealand regulations are – the more New Zealand can be a ‘sandbox’ for big tech and big biotech. Most people possibly remember that instance, as little kids playing in the sandbox, when the big kids ripped through (when the teachers weren’t looking) like a tornado leaving debris in their wake. Which big kid really did it? Always a problem when the big kids rip through.

Another sandbox issue – if you don’t cover it every night – steward it and safeguard it, the next day it can be full of anything – possum, feral cat and rodent shit. Ask any kindergarten.

But right now – there is no way we can know what is happening in our sandbox – because the funding pathways for inconvenient research that produces uncomfortable knowledge that powerful interests would prefer really were not produced – simply aren’t there.

Our new policies for new laws repeatedly and consistently fail to follow trustworthy scientific processes. I don’t blame domestic scientists for not speaking up. Science funding is so difficult to get, people applying for funding can spend 20% of their time simply writing applications.

In an MBIE directed research environment where patents are prized above human, water and soil health, it is no wonder that good people working in agriculture conflate Bayer leaving with an EPA that ‘needs to be efficient, predictable and fit for purpose’ rather than simply a time where it needs to pull in its belt due to having to pay out lots of glyphosate court and settlement costs.

It’s no wonder that the public and public sector alike, forget that the role of the NZEPA is to safeguard the life-supporting capacity of air, water, soil, and ecosystems:

‘The purpose of this Act is 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 MBIE won’t fund the science for long-term residue testing and to ensure that the information that underpin in silico work on our computers, from our models to regional variation data, is accurate. That it reflects the state of knowledge on everything from microbial communities, to trace element levels, to heavy metal accumulation, to the role of trace elements in optimising health, and being ‘knocked out’ such as through chelation to heavy metals.

This is why you don’t get soil scientists with years of expertise on the glyphosate toxicity or on the problem of heavy metals and plastics in soil as contaminant byproducts from ag-chem pesticides – there’s no long-term funding for that sort of thing.

Too many of us know farmers and growers with ‘occupational diseases’ or we’ve been sickened by neighbour’s spraying and fumigation. But the funding pathways to shift trajectories just aren’t there.

It’s not the farmers and growers that are to blame, it’s a government that keeps working for Big Corporate in service of something called the ‘economy’, that in bureaucratic brains seems be detached from real world data on water, sediment or soil quality or recognise that productivity will decline if human health declines.

It’s a government that excludes any consideration of water pollution in metrics in our environmental-economic accounts. The productivity lost from industrial chemical pollution is simply ‘not a thing’.

Really, if the government was working to safeguard the environment and ensure that farmer, grower, soil, water and ecosystem health was protected, we’d be sacking the head of the NZEPA and re-funding the NZEPA and New Zealand’s scientists for public health research that has the freedom to consider nutrition, toxicity and metabolic and mental health.

Perhaps any ‘urgency’ with changes to the Environmental Protection Authority (and FSANZ) really could be about a massive shift in culture and funding to ensure that officials could include economic considerations below or alongside human and environmental health.

The urgency could involve pulling science funding outside of MBIE’s grasp. Placing stewardship of health and resources at the top of our science priorities, instead of ‘innovation’. Keeping science policy at arm’s length from the desires of the lobby groups, globalists and the National or Labour party whips that somehow seems to be updated as an ‘election mandate’ following each election, when the Uniparty pivot occurs.

In the political maelstrom New Zealand scientists appear caught in an eternal spiral to the bottom, where regulation is in the way of efficiency, economic growth and predictability. Where regulation should be nothing less than performative a rubber stamp in service of making an innovative product that might one day be purchased for lots of money by Big Corporate.