Just before Christmas, the government introduced a Gene Technology Bill that will have a big impact on farmers, our industry and our position in the international marketplace.
The changes it wants to make are on how we, as a country, manage the risks of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) on-farm and in the supply chain.
Whatever your views are on GMOs, there’s a lot at stake. That’s why 93% of people, who took part in a poll last year, said they wanted a conversation about GMOs.
But the government is rushing the Bill through, without taking the time to get input from you and I - the people who will have to make it work on the ground.
So, what would the new Gene Technology Bill mean for us? In a nutshell, more paperwork and more compliance costs just to stand still - with the added risk of trading away our GE-free competitive advantage.
We have been looking at some aspects of the Bill. The government wants to relieve scientists and GM seed companies of the responsibility to prove that there are any economic benefits from releasing a GMO, or to account for the costs that will fall on farmers and supply chains.
This goes against the advice of the ministry with the most experience in the international marketplace, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which thinks economic assessment of GMOs is necessary because of "the unpredictable nature of the international trading environment where gene technology has historically been controversial" (including in New Zealand).
The government also wants to fully deregulate some new GMOs: ones made using certain types of gene editing. This means that scientists and GM seed companies won’t need to account for where their GMOs are, and where they shouldn’t be, let alone risk-assess them.
It will be on non-GM producers to figure out how to keep them out of our fields and the supply chain.
When it comes to the on-farm and supply chain practicalities, there’s no detail. The government says it will work up regulations to deal with this later.
For now, we are being told not to worry, because GM and non-GM farming systems "co-exist" in other countries.
But GM pasture-grass systems haven’t been commercialised overseas, so there’s no experience or confidence to draw from there. Of concern, Wellington is also now telling us that GM perennial ryegrass won’t spread.
On the compliance-cost front, the government makes no bones about the fact that proceeding with its plan will mean "additional costs" for farmers who supply non-GM market demand. This is a sizable chunk of the farming community.
It even acknowledges that these costs will be "high impact", but doesn’t seem fussed about where the costs will fall and hasn’t produced anything to give us confidence that the costs will be minimised or fairly shared.
There is also the issue that a lot of us are worried about and want handled carefully: the implications of surrendering the value of the GM-free status of our productive lands, the impact on our national brand and consumer attitudes to GMOs.
Given how heavily market issues have defined uptake of GMOs to date, you would expect the government would have done a fair bit of work to understand how its plan would impact us on-farm, in the supply chain and in our export markets.
It acknowledges that, under its plan, "New Zealand will no longer be able to rely on GMO freedom to give assurance that traded goods are GMO-free when they need to be."
But it hasn’t made any serious attempt to understand the markets or the economic impacts of changing our position.
We are very conscious of our responsibilities as farmers and the pressures that our sector is under to meet Scope 3 carbon commitments, but there are hard-edged trade-offs we need to be able to work through carefully.
For now, they are between our current, established value proposition for non-GM, pasture-fed farming and the release of experimental GM lines that may (or may not) stack up in reducing carbon. New GM ryegrasses are still many years away from being able to help us reduce our emissions at scale and may not be accepted in our high-value markets.
This when we have non-GM tools now that can help us reduce our carbon footprint. Under the government’s proposal, a GM crop could be released without the strategic analysis critical to our market positioning as a sector. So where does this leave us?
We know farmers are absolutely up for a conversation about GMOs. This rush job is not the conversation that we deserve.
It is not good enough to say that farmers should just write a submission. It's hard for us to do that – whether through representative bodies or individually – particularly with such a complex piece of legislation and so little detail on how the new regime will work, both on-farm and in the supply chain.
The rush is all of the government’s making, so we’re looking to Wellington to extend the submission period and carry out the necessary analysis so we all understand the impacts the proposals will have on farming and potentially New Zealand’s export economy.
Without adequate consultation in its current format, we know we will be the ones wearing the cost of this Bill, whichever way it’s looked at.
• Mike and Ruth Williams are sheep and beef farmers on Banks Peninsula and are part of a group of concerned farmers and growers who want to make sure there’s a fair deal and consultation on GM issues.
