Woods Megan: Agricultural Compounds and Veterinary Medicines Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWoods Megan: Agricultural Compounds and Veterinary Medicines Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 15 September 2015. Volume:708;Page:6661. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): It is a pleasure to take a call on this bill. I would like to congratulate the chair of the Primary Production Committee Ian McKelvie who has just taken his seat for finally getting some work to do. I think it is an indictment on this Government actually that this is the first piece of legislation that we have seen in this space in this term of Parliament. This is of course from a party in Government that purports to be the party of farmers and it is finally taking its first piece of legislation to the Primary Production Committee. So I would like to congratulate that chair on finally getting some work through to his committee and on seeing some legislation. Maybe you could speak to the Leader of the House about upping the work rate of the legislative programme in your area—not your area Mr Assistant Speaker; that member’s area.As my colleague Meka Whaitiri outlined very clearly Labour’s position is that we are supporting this bill going to the select committee firstly because we would like to see the select committee do some work and secondly because we actually think that there is a really important function that has to occur here in terms of the submission process. There are clearly some very important questions that need to be addressed in the process of the select committee’s examination of this legislation. We have had a good outline from speakers who have spoken about the function of this bill—about innovative and non-innovative products about extending time periods and about the balance that needs to be drawn between providing protection and the incentive to innovate for agrichemical companies and between the need to maintain competitiveness and not price some of these products out of the market for farmers.What we are talking about here is the kind of evidence that is required when protection is sought—the kind of evidence that needs to be filed. This is always a balance for any company that is innovating whether it is for a patent or for a plant variety right. There is a level of detail that needs to be filed and the person who is doing the filing has to have confidence that they can still protect their advantage and their investment through the fact that there is a strong business case for them to do this. So this is always vitally important. We know that in New Zealand’s agribusiness industry having the ability to protect the intellectual property that we invest inis vitally important—again whether that is through plant variety rights or through bringing in new uses or new products that can be used in our agricultural sector.I think that there has been some very good commentary on the bill. One of the issues is around new uses and I think that the previous speaker Ian McKelvie has talked about this and about how sometimes it can be that for a particular product when an innovative use for that product has come up because it crosses over—whether that is in the human consumption chain or the animal consumption chain—the kinds of regulations around how you use it and its use differ. There are different regulatory standards that have to be met. I think the kind of testing and evidence that needs to be submitted around new use is a very important question and one that the select committee will need to spend some time on.A very good example of this was provided by Mark Ross the chief executive of Agcarm who used the example of fodder beet planting which grew from virtually nothing to around 50000 hectares last year. This fodder beet was classified as a different crop from fodder brassica which had been the traditional use of this. Companies needed to do more efficacy and residue trials to register products for fodder beet. This cost more than $100000 a product because this was for a new use—it was a fodder beet rather than a fodder brassica.Fodder beet growers need chemicals to be registered for fodder beet—that just makes sense—otherwise they face having to use products that are registered for forage brassicas off label. This raises real risks around crop residues and residues in meat or milk and real questions that do need to be addresses and examined. As for the cost of this—if you have a look at a recalled formulation it might cost $300000 to reformulate a product for a new use but it may cost $500000 for the efficacy trials around getting the evidence required for filing. So these are all important questions that are going to have to be considered by the select committee when it comes to the bill.In her contribution my colleague Meka Whaitiri spoke about the very low number of submissions that had been included to date in the preliminary work that has led up to this legislation coming to the floor of this House and I would like to see a greater number of submitters. I would like to hear from a greater number of research organisations in our agribusiness sector to find out where the balance lies for them as researchers who are looking for the development of innovative products. Does the advantage lie in allowing farmers access to off-protection moderately priced farm products or does it lie in our having the ability to protect that for longer? What is best in terms of our ability to innovate in the agribusiness sector? I think that this is a very important consideration which the committee will need to have when it comes to consider this bill.One of the other questions that I would like the committee to explore is of course the interface with the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act as to why it is that whenever we are looking at consequential amendments to that Act we need to proceed with caution and we need to ensure that the protections that we need are indeed in place and that we are not either inadvertently or by design opening the door for consequential amendments to things that really might not be desirable to New Zealand. So I think these are real questions at any time and I note that in this legislation there are going to be consequential amendments to that Act.I think one of the key questions that was raised in some of the submissions that have already been heard to date was about when Federated Farmers brought up this very much increasing monopoly time period and the offset with the access to these chemicals and they asked why it is that we cannot just say that consulting with the agribusiness sector is about consulting with the agri-chemicals sector. It needs to be across the supply chain it needs to be across the sector and it needs to understand the different parts of it because of course there are going to be people who will benefit from these changes. There are people who will do very well because they will get extra periods of monopoly granted under this legislation but what is the cost of that? Those are all considerations that need to be considered.I think that there are important considerations and questions that we need to ask. I for one am very interested in the question about new use and the innovation that we can do as a country both to combat some of our greatest environmental problems and to improve the way in which we can potentially use existing products for new uses. For example what products are already on the market that could be used to reduce nitrate runoff so that we could actually see an improvement in our waterways? In a similar vein if you are doing stuff to mitigate the nitrate runoff what products are already there that might actually have the added benefit of decreasing nitrous oxide and therefore decreasing our contribution to greenhouse gases? So I think given the amount of emphasis that by design New Zealand has to put into considering how it is that research and development is going to help find our way out of producing 50 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions as a nation we need to make sure that we have got a regulatory regime that makes it possible for us to innovate.We need to be able to innovate right across our agribusiness sector but we also have to be working always to ensure that we have the right protections in place—that we have the right protections in place for our environment; that we have the right protections in place for the rest of the sector—and that this is not about the unnecessary gifting of a monopoly to only the part of the supply chain that will benefit. We have to ensure that we have those right across the way. So I think the select committee has a hard job ahead of it and a lot of work to do in terms of making sure that we do have these questions answered adequately. It is a job I am sure that it is looking forward to and relishing with its first piece of legislation in this term of Parliament. Thank you.Debate interrupted.