I note with interest the government’s recent musings on rethinking genetically modified organisms (GMOs) institutions.
As far as I can see, it’s more about the potential for medical research, but this should be of acute interest to agriculture.
The whole GMO debate has been a third track in politics dating back to the royal commission’s finding in 2001.
Successive governments did not want to go there.
New Zealand has subsequently been awarded the title GE Free and has played a key role in developing our natural origin brand in the food sector.
The question is: at what price?
Science has advanced tremendously over the past 20 years and are we limited to missing out on the opportunities of emerging technologies?
In the agricultural sector, gene editing technology is paramount. In short, accelerating natural genetic selection as opposed to transgenic manipulation or cutting genes from different plants and species.
It doesn’t seem logical that we can talk about climate emergencies but be unwilling to discuss the potential of the methane-suppressing GE ryegrass being developed by New Zealand scientists at AgResearch, but ironically unable to get here tried.
The real difficulty, of course, is that you can’t be “half pregnant”: once this stuff is in the wild, the genie is literally out of the bottle.
To be clear, I’m not advocating one or the other here. My instinctive reaction is that I feel a little uncomfortable letting go of this stuff and I quite like the GE-free concept. Surveys conducted in our overseas markets by Beef + Lamb have suggested that there is a consumer preference for GE-free. Would following the “me too” path of embracing GE only send us into the commodity game? But if premiums are involved, what are they and are they worth the considerations we now have to pay for, for example, greenhouse gas emissions? Are we possibly missing out on developing the IP and using it for the greater good?
This will be a fraught issue and one that will evoke strong feelings on both sides of the argument. While I don’t pretend to know the answers, I do believe that it is high time we had the debate.