Transcript

Neil Robertson (Te Aroha College): Our kids are particularly interested in GMOs and how ERMA makes decisions relating to those. A lot of people don't understand genetic engineering and what that means – there’s often a knee-jerk reaction, I guess. How does ERMA make its decisions about what is allowable and what is not allowable, when we can say that the vast majority of the public is not very aware of what is going on?

Val Orchard (ERMA): Well, first of all, there are no GMOs that have been released into the environment. Any GMOs in New Zealand at the moment are in containment, and that containment will either be in a laboratory or a greenhouse, or we have got contained field trials. But where there are high levels of public interest, there will be a public hearing for people to be able to talk, to help make their case.

The sorts of things that the scientists are interested in doing using GMOs is, for example, to put insect-resistant genes into a plant. So the scientists want to see if that actually really works, and if it does, it’s potentially really quite good for the environment because you can stop spraying large amounts of insecticide around. But everything is in containment, so the flowers are all cut off, so there are no seeds that can escape or no pollen or anything like that.

Manuka Henare (ERMA): I've been involved in three hearings on GMOs. The first one I was a specialist advisor on Māori matters, and that was the transgenic cattle decision. In brief, the idea was they would take a human gene and put that gene into a cow, and in due course, from the milk that came from genetically-modified cows, they would be able to extract a protein that possibly could address the problem of multiple sclerosis.

So the potential outcome was really quite extraordinary. But is GMO research good? That’s a moral problem for a lot of people. But the other one was, and this is the business of transgenics, should you take a gene from one species and insert it in another species? And there is heaps of moral debate about that one, and it’s still a big one.

So what ERMA has to do as the authority, we have to look at it from all kinds of angles, not just the science, but what’s the impact, or likely impact on the economy, the market place? How do we take into account people's religious anxieties, the moral problems, the ethical problems, and Māori concerns?

And I have to say that, by and large, the Māori community are reasonably evenly divided on the matter, on both questions – GMO in general, but also transgenic in particular. In other words, I think the Māori community reflects the New Zealand community in terms of the diversity of opinion, although there are different moral issues being raised on the Māori side to, say, many other people in New Zealand.