Sage Eugenie: Agricultural Compounds and Veterinary Medicines Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSage Eugenie: Agricultural Compounds and Veterinary Medicines Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 13 October 2015. Volume:709;Page:7179. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]EUGENIE SAGE (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. I am pleased to take a short call on the Agricultural Compounds and Veterinary Medicines Amendment Bill. The Green Party will be opposing this bill.As others have noted the substances used in pesticides herbicides and veterinary medicines have to be registered before they can be manufactured used or sold and new uses for the compounds also have to be registered. As part of that whole regulatory approval process applicants have to supply information about the product’s safety its efficacy and the likelihood of residues after use. Often quite considerable information and research are needed to provide that information. Information that is provided to the regulator by one manufacturer obviously has value to competitors because they can use it to formulate a similar generic knock-off product without the upfront costs of having to do the same research for the regulator.The Green Party certainly wants the primary sector to have access to the latest technology both for animal health and for plant protection. But we also want to reduce our use of pesticides and herbicides and we want to move much more towards integrated pest management. We want to see more chemicals with reduced impacts in use and certainly new products can help here. But we are opposing the bill because the balance in the legislation is far too heavily weighted to meeting industry wants rather than public needs for good information on the chemicals that we broadcast so freely across our landscape to control plant and animal pests in our farming systems.I would like to note that around a third of the 3000 different products that are currently registered for sale in New Zealand under the principal Act are agricultural chemicals. The public has an absolute right to know what is in these pesticides and herbicides what the toxic compounds are what their effects are and what the residues are. Although industry wants to see new uses and new formulations have data protection we do not because it means that the information remains secret and it is not in the public domain. Extending the data protection or the secrecy provisions in this bill around those active chemical ingredients in herbicides pesticides and veterinary medicines will certainly benefit the companies that manufacture and sell them because it does reduce the ability of competitors to piggyback on their research. But it does not meet the public’s need for information.We are not convinced that there is in fact a real need for this bill. This demand for law changes to extend the data protection period has come primarily from industry players. It certainly has not come from regulators like the Environmental Protection Authority or the Ministry for Primary Industries. The bill in effect actually ignores the advice from the Ministry for Primary Industries—Hon Jo Goodhew: What?EUGENIE SAGE: —and appears very much to be based on the demands of the chemical industry. The Associate Minister for Primary Industries is saying “What?” but if she reads the regulatory impact statement the Ministry for Primary Industries says “there is no compelling reason to increase the … data protection term for innovative compounds” because as the regulatory impact statement notes manufacturers can patent those compounds for a 20-year term. So they do not have to worry about competitors developing copycat knock-off products. So why is it needed to increase the data protection period from 5 to 8 years when the Minister for Primary Industries is saying there is no compelling reason to do this?We have got the Government here interfering in the market to benefit the big multinationals like Monsanto instead of providing more transparency about what active ingredients are being used and their impacts and residues. As another speaker had noted the Ministry for Primary Industries had also said that the extended “length of data protection may”—note “may”—“provide an incentive to add ‘minor’ ”—note “minor”—“uses to labels”. In that regulatory impact statement the Ministry for Primary Industries is making it very clear that there is not a strong case for this bill.