| New Zealand’s food safety regulator ‘shopped’ for alternative advice when a report it had commissioned from ESR questioned the safety of a GM food. The original report by Dr Lou Gallagher said there were toxicological concerns over MON863 corn that could not be refuted without further study. She was evaluating a French study that newly reported signs of organ toxicity in rats fed this variety of GM corn. NZFSA first delayed providing the Gallagher report to its minister. Then ten weeks after receiving the report in June 2007, and two days after the Ombudsman wrote to NZFSA following its refusal to release it to the Sustainability Council, NZFSA asked ESR for an “updated” report. The new document was produced by a different ESR division to the group Gallagher belonged to. However, instead of an “updated” report, NZFSA accepted a letter that carried no clear reference to the Gallagher Report or its scientific conclusions. In place of a formal peer-reviewed report that had answered NZFSA’s brief and was prepared by a scientist with the appropriate expertise, NZFSA accepted a letter that carried just four sentences in response to the original brief, and was signed off by a group that NZFSA knew had originally passed on the work after stating they lacked the appropriate expertise. The letter indicated there was no scientific evidence that MON863 is unsafe to eat. For the full statement, see latest news on the right of this page
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| The proposed rules for the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) will involve huge transfers of wealth but make very little difference to New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions in the next five years, says a Sustainability Council report released today. Households, road users, and small and medium enterprises (SMEs), that generate a third of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions, will meet 90% of the payments required before 2013 as a result of the ETS. Prior to 2013, the ETS fully exempts agricultural producers, and large industrial emitters are heavily exempted and rebated. Households, road users and SMEs will be billed for $4 billion of total net payments of $4.4 billion resulting from the ETS up to 2012 (based on the current world price for carbon credits of about $30 per tonne). As the great bulk of transport fuel charges are paid directly or indirectly by SMEs and households, it is these groups that will carry the ETS. Read the full media statement >> Read the Sustainability Council report >> |
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