Planned law bundles widely supported applications of gene science with much more risky uses in the outdoors, without properly protecting NZ Inc from their economic risks. Time to split the Bill                                    .

In the pursuit of economic growth through gene technology, planned new law opens up big economic risks from one class of gene tech.

“Enabling” legislation would offer gene technologists privileged protection to do business without having to be accountable where it matters most.

In consequence, the Gene Technology Bill fails to properly protect ‘NZ Inc’ from major commercial exposures, strategic gaming by offshore competitors, and losses arising from accident or mal-intent.

The bill sets this up by first bundling widely supported applications of gene science with much more risky uses in the outdoors – all under the same job lot rules.

Applications in medicine, lab research, and industrially fermented foods can be regulated by the bill with minor changes to it.  The government could clear the way for these more controlled uses with little argument.

But the outdoor use of genetic modification (GM) brings far more risk and complexity than the regime is designed to properly cope with.

Bundling both types of risk in order to uniformly “streamline” the regulations is no accident.  But it’s still extraordinary how far the bill goes on behalf of proponents of crops making use of GM – also known as gene-editing.

Sheltered from Commercial Realities

The state largess would include: economic impacts being excluded from consideration, no liability for harm, highly discriminatory legal rights, frequent overrides of good regulatory practice, and no genuine regulatory independence.

But perhaps the most extraordinary part is that for all the effort being made to shelter outdoor uses from commercial realities, the biggest threat to them – and the economy – is beyond Parliament’s control.

That threat is high levels of consumer resistance to GM foods internationally that have persisted for nearly 30 years.

For example, more than three times as many consumers think GM food is “unsafe to eat” as those who think it is safe, on average, according to a 20 country Pew Research Center poll.  And in no country surveyed were there more who think it is safe than unsafe.

As a result, consumers vote overwhelmingly for GMO content to be labelled.  For example, IPOS polling showed 86% of EU consumers favour labelling of “food made from GM crops” and 81% for “food produced from animals fed with GM crops”.

So retailers often find themselves compelled to privately label for GM content where governments don’t already mandate it.  There is no place to hide.

And with food making up a majority of our export income, the potential impacts of consumer resistance to GM food is clearly a matter of national economic importance.

Yet prior to the bill being framed, government failed to properly scope the risks – let alone model them.  Officials cite time pressure from ministers that “compressed the analysis able to be undertaken in a highly complex area, and may mean options, impacts, and consequences were not (or not fully) considered”.

The result was nothing resembling a proper cost benefit analysis of the bill, with its assessment leaving the benefits estimate entirely blank (as this was “difficult” to undertake), and its assessment of costs was beyond shallow.

The stock response to evidence of consumer concerns – that segregation would save the day – is similarly shallow in terms of particular exposures we face (such as with grasses).

Skewed Process and Denial

So the bill has been constructed with literally no estimate of what level of economic benefits its skewed treatment of gene tech could generate – and so no idea of what it might be worth trading away to get that.

Nonetheless, economic impacts are simply ruled out of contention – unlike their consideration under the RMA and the current GMO legislation.  They would no longer be taken account of by the regulator in assessing an application to use a GMO outdoors, regardless of their scale or effect.  So the voices of our export markets and affected farmers are excluded on this.

While the legislation would take account of impacts on the environment and human health, the regulator cannot be held accountable for its assessment by those with a public interest – for only those with a “direct interest” get legal standing to take a case, and only on points of law.  So the voices of those defending public health and the public estate are also side-lined.

And the new regulator would be a single individual under the thumb of the minster, in place of the current diverse body of people.  So the voices of a wider mix of expertise and experience will not be heard at the decision making table, of one.

Yet things go much deeper than just skewing the process: the bill also relies on full blown denialism.

While a number of local authorities have gone through lengthy community processes to regulate GMOs in their regions, the bill would outlaw this by ruling that GMOs cannot be treated “differently from other organisms”.  In other words, the bill pretends there is no difference in order to deny communities the ability to act independently and create regional brands.

The bill even refuses to name ‘genetically modified organisms’- and instead administers only a subset of these as “regulated organisms”.  Yet New Zealand is obliged under international treaty to be able to advise when we export any live GMOs – not just those deemed to be “regulated organisms”.  So we need to be able to track them all, rather than have the bill try to airbrush some out of sight.

But denialism peaks when gene tech meets biosecurity.  For as the Environment Ministry was at pains to advise ministers in May last year, if an organism is not GM but is new to this country (and so is a potential threat to agriculture), it goes the route of stricter existing legislation the bill seeks to displace.  However, if that same organism is a GM variant, it goes the new “streamlined” route.

At that point, instead of having to show that there would be a net benefit to New Zealand  from bringing something in and that it would pass minimum safety standards, the applicant would only need to demonstrate that the GM version “can be reasonably managed and controlled”.

This double standard opens a major loophole in the country’s much-admired biosecurity protections.  Which plants would newly get through as GM versions, and what additional risk of harm the lower standard would pose to New Zealand’s agriculture and ecosystems, is just one of a host of unknowns this opens up.

And where do the financial impacts of such unquantified risks land?  Not on those who release the GMO, unless the regulator makes it a special condition, as there are no liability provisions for harm caused or for clean-up.

They will tend to land on the taxpayer and food produces whose sector happens to get caught up in, for example, a contamination event where a GMO that is an illegal food in an export market finds its way into New Zealand production … because it was airbrushed out of what had to be tracked.

Events like this can be very costly, with three having generated damages of over a billion dollars and many more at lesser amounts.

Strategic Gaming from Offshore

And that’s just business as usual exposures.  What the bill’s design also makes us vulnerable to is losses arising from strategic gaming by competing offshore interests.

For example, GM grasses are one of the industry’s biggest hopes for providing economic gain – through projected increases in biomass and reduced animal emissions.

But perennial ryegrass tends to spread over great distances and officials reported to ministers in 2009 that once released, GM ryegrass would become “permanent components of New Zealand’s pasture and dairy production systems”.

GM grasses would also be captured by labelling schemes run by supermarkets that advise consumers of products that are from animals reared on GM feeds.

So any release of a GM grass has nationwide implications for the country’s biggest export earner that would be irreversible.

It follows that any decision to make a release should be taken only after extensive study of the risks and benefits by local industry and other interested parties before a regulator, and approved only if there would be a net benefit to New Zealand.

That’s exactly what would happen under current law – and exactly the reverse of what could happen under the bill.

If a foreign entity applied to release a GM grass under the bill, there would be no way to consider its market impacts, is strategic implications, or whether it was even the best form of a particular grass.

The thinly resourced regulator would be left with only environmental and human health matters that it could cite if it wanted to decline the application, and would then be up against the asymmetric legal rights the bill sets that give the upper hand to applicants.

As a result, that offshore party could end up effectively gazumping any local deliberation about whether to take the risk with GM grasses.  Further, it could potentially saddle the country with a version that no local producers would want even if they did favour a form of GM grass.

Alternatively, if an entity were to release a GM grass without going through the approvals process, the maximum penalty for a company is $1 million – small change for what’s at stake.

And in an increasingly unstable world, the risk of straightforward sabotage cannot be ignored.  The bill’s architects seem to have forgotten that GM has always been “dual use” technology – so just as it has potential to boost productivity, so it can devastate this.

Although the risk of prosecution may not be the most significant deterrent in such cases, the offence provisions are generic and don’t begin to properly deal with this.

Split the Bill

In total, the bill is naïve in its approach to the assurance side of the regulatory equation – and far out of balance on the side devoted to fostering innovation.

  • It would seriously skew the approval processes for GM outdoor uses on the basis of hypothetical gains that, when pressed, officials could not give any estimate for: could not provide the most basic element of a justification for privileged treatment.
  • It attempts to shelter GM crop proponents from commercial realities that New Zealand has no meaningful ability to influence – as it is a standards taker here, not a standards setter.
  • It fails to properly protect against serious economic risks that a nation highly dependent on food exports cannot ignore.

The bill should be split to set aside the provisions governing the outdoor use of GMOs for later parliamentary consideration, while the way is cleared for other uses.  Only a tiny number of outdoor GMOs are at an advanced stage, with none ready for use now and all can continue to be trialled in other jurisdictions meanwhile – including GM grasses.

This would allow time not only for the baseline economic and risk analysis to be completed, but also for the “conversation” on the use of GMOs that primary sector leaders had been calling for prior to law drafting.  They had been eager to work through issues such as: trade impacts, segregation, and who pays for contamination, before the bill was framed.

Despite all the rhetoric to the contrary, the process for gaining approvals for GMO release has rarely been the biggest reason why GM foods have failed to be released locally.  They have repeatedly failed on straight-up commercial grounds because consumers have low trust in GM foods.

As no amount of privileged treatment will alter that inconvenient truth, we need to ensure protections are not compromised.

 

This article first appeared in Newsroom on 10 February 2025 and can be accessed here.