Ewen-Street Ian: Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (Genetically Modified Organisms Moratorium Reinstatement) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Ewen-Street Ian: Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (Genetically Modified Organisms Moratorium Reinstatement) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
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IAN EWEN-STREET (Green) 
: 
 I move  
That the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (Genetically Modified Organisms Moratorium Reinstatement) Amendment Bill be now read a first time 
. At the appropriate time I will move that this bill be considered by the Primary Production Committee. 
In the 3 years since the royal commission reported back we have picked up a considerable amount of knowledge about genetic engineering and I would have to say that almost without exception it has been very bad news for the GE industry. As members will know I have sent each one of them a personal letter outlining some of my concerns about GE so I will not go into them in detail now. I want to concentrate on a couple of issues that I think clarify why I consider that this technology is fatally flawed in terms of exposing it to the wider environment in New Zealand. Perhaps the most damning thing of all has occurred from a research project called the human genome project. Members may recall that this project was designed to identify the human genetic profile and to understand the relationship between all the genes that we pass on from generation to generation—that is the heritable genes; the genes that give us eye colour skin colour susceptibility to disease and things like that. 
It was a fine ideal. The people working on that project identified that there is something like 100000 different heritable traits in the human body. They went on their way looking for the 100000 genes that relate to those outcomes. But the human genome project scored a spectacular own goal. Far from proving that this was a precise science and they could map all these genes to the outcomes one on one they found that instead of 100000 genes there were only 30000. So they could not map one gene to one outcome; they had to map one gene to multiple outcomes—on average about 3½ per gene. So they had multiple traits from one gene. 
What is now becoming clear as a result of this human genome project is that the genes do not work in isolation. They work with each other and they work with the proteins that exist in each cell. That is what determines the outcome of any manipulation. We now know that not only does this make it enormously more difficult to isolate a desired gene to have a particular outcome it is also impossible to know what additional undesired outcomes will come from the same gene. Let me quote from the US Government website: “Outcomes are specified by the gene sequence and by the proteins in the same cell.” It then goes on to say that studies of the relationship will be the focus of research for many decades to come. We are just in the infancy of this science. 
Members should think about it. If we take a gene from the human body each cell has the same DNA string. 
Every cell in our body has DNA. But our cells have different functions. The same DNA is found in our toenail cells as is found in our liver cells blood cells and eyeball cells. So if we were to take a DNA string from there and put it into some other animal for argument’s sake do we know how it will express? The answer is no we do not know. 
We lay people can take several things from this. First of all moving a gene from one location to another does not give a specific outcome. Despite what people in the industry say it does not give a specific outcome; it gives multiple outcomes. Secondly changing one gene in the sequence may lead to a cascading sequence of events—not just one event. The academic literature is full of words like “may” “appear” and “believe”. Clearly biologists do not understand the chemistry of life. This also will put to rest the idea of substantial equivalence—the idea that if it looks the same smells the same and tastes the same it is the same. It may appear that way but it is inevitable there will be other outcomes that we do not necessarily see upfront. For thinking people this surely is game set and match for genetic engineering. 
Hon Marian Hobbs 
: Oh! 
IAN EWEN-STREET 
: It is game over I say to the Minister. One simply cannot say that this is a precise science. In fact we have proved that it is a very imprecise science. 
If we take that bit of information in conjunction with the way consumers in our elite markets overseas treat genetic engineering we can see we are on to a loser. But we should think about what is happening to the biotech companies. Of the top 50 biotech corporates last year 38 made losses. Overall they lost $5.4 billion in 1 year including those that made a profit. The  
Wall Street Journal 
 that well-known left-wing rag describes the industry as having “yielded negative returns for decades and it generally digs its hole deeper every year.” 
The consumer resistance to genetically modified foods in particular is powerful for New Zealand. We are a market-driven economy. We must listen to the market signals of the people who buy our food products and those signals are crystal-clear. People simply do not want to buy genetically engineered food. Look at the example of the United States and Canada going back 5 or 6 years. America’s corn exports to the European Union declined by 98 percent in 2 years. The Canadian canola growers lost 100 percent of their market in 2 years and it has never recovered. At least those countries have a subsidy scheme so that the farmers actually survived. But in Argentina which started growing GE soy the whole economy has become a basket case. 
I urge members to think about this. We are at present trying to negotiate a free-trade deal with America. One of the conditions of any free-trade deal we may have with America is that it wants us to embrace genetic engineering. That is a bit strange. If genetic engineering were so good the Americans would be saying: “Hey look we don’t mind having a free-trade deal with you but you can’t have our really good GE stuff; we’re going to keep that to ourselves.” But to put it as a condition of a free-trade deal means there is something wrong with it—and the thing that is wrong with it is that they cannot sell it. They cannot sell it to elite markets in the European Union Japan Australia or anywhere else. They cannot sell it other than as stock feed. They cannot even give it away as aid to the Third World. 
They are now working in a different market from us. They do not sell the same products. Our products are seen overseas as being clean green pure natural and very highly sought after. The prices we get in our overseas market are extremely good. Primary production exports are booming despite the high dollar. We have a marketing opportunity made in heaven. Because we no longer compete with equivalent products from America Canada Argentina and to a certain extent Australia we can virtually name our price. They cannot sell their product. The only way they can get back into that market having gone down this one-way street of GE is to bring us down to the same level. That is why they want us to have GE in this country. It makes sense for us not to go the same way. 
I would like the Minister to pause for a moment and think about the ownership of patents. She is on record as saying that one day GE will pay for our health and education needs in this country. 
Hon Marian Hobbs 
: That’s not what she said. 
IAN EWEN-STREET 
: I say to the Minister that it is in the  
Hansard 
; I urge her to check. Something like 97 percent of the patents are owned by overseas companies. So even if we did develop something in this country that was valuable we still would not make money out of the patents; we would simply export all of that profit. 
This moratorium gives us time. It gives us time to think to say: “Let’s have a cup of tea.” Does anybody actually regret the fact that New Zealand is nuclear-free? No they do not. Thinking people by and large do not. I recommend this bill to the House and urge members to support it going to the select committee.