by frog
Research organisation Sustainable Future, has just released a new report showing the Government has implemented only 20 of the 49 recommendations of the 2001 Royal Commission on Genetic Modification.
The report concludes:
These findings show that the New Zealand Government is not currently pursuing the strategic option of ‘preserving opportunities’ as proposed by the Commissioners and raise further questions about New Zealand’s ability to manage the current and future risks of genetic modification. It leaves open questions about how well New Zealand can manage risks associated with current outdoor developments and field tests. It leaves untested and unclear how New Zealand will cope on the first application to ERMA for GM release (including conditional release), and provides little confidence that this will be done in a robust manner. Perhaps most importantly, it leaves unanswered whether the current framework meets the expectations of New Zealanders.
Jeanette sounds furious:
Not only are they [the Government] totally uninterested in keeping this country GE-free, they will not even protect non-GE farmers and New Zealand’s clean and green agricultural brand. It is yet more evidence that government agencies, supported by their ministers, don’t care about ruining our organic and GE free export brands…
While neglecting to set up a proper protection framework, government agencies were instead supporting larger and more risky field trials, for example Crop and Food’s proposed trial announced last week allowing plants to flower and seed, risking contaminating the country’s safe and GE-free food supply brands.
The government is giving every impression that it thinks it can just wait until the hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders who opposed introducing GE into New Zealand get bored or distracted with something else. Then it can go ahead with its original plans to introduce GE.
Published in Environment & Resource Management by frog on Wed, April 16th, 2008
Tags: GE, Genetic engineering, genetic modification, Jeanette Fitzsimons, Royal Commission
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
I don’t see why we need to introduce GE into the wider country at all, given the demand for products that are certainly not GE. It’s kinda puzzling that they don’t listen to reason here.
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“It’s kinda puzzling that they don’t listen to reason here.”
Never underestimate the power of institutional inertia and group think.
The majority of bureaucrats, particularly CEOS, are all surrounded by the whole post-1984 “Economic growth is good, no hippies can stop it paradigm.”
Not to mention that “like hires like”, so that if there any “Left wingers” (i dislike this as a broad term, but) in MFAT and Treasury and MCommerce, I’d be every surprised. And those that have been hired even if not right wing themselves are still working within the rightist view of business and economics that is prevalent in the universities here.
I vaguely recall a mention on Frogblog before that although Labour have had 9 years to change the public sector they have really only tinkered around the edges. Most of the Roger Douglas “reforms” are still there, and they longer they stay, the more they are regarded as the norm, and stronger the resistance to change, and the difficulty in changing.
In fact the more I think about Labour’s nine years, the more I think they have wasted so much time.
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Perhaps the plants will turn into triffids. Then we’ll all be doomed. Well, more doomed anyway…..
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I just looked up triffids -haha! You do go back a ways. Luckily they can be destroyed using salt water.
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Hey, hey! Let’s not get too ageist here!
I remember the triffids and even “the trouble with tribbles”. It wasn’t that long ago, was it BluePeter? Beam me up Scotty, I want to watch Boston Legal…
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Jingyang: I know people that know people- the Treasury is actually being run by a Labour supporter
But yeah, I imagine it is inertia (GE will feed the hungry! I’m sure I heard that!) and a disrespect for current research that drives this latest trend.
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isn’t “day of the triffids” required reading in school any more?
triffids would of course solve the world energy crisis, & are no problem at all, as long as we don’t go blind
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>>You do go back a ways
Steady on, young whippersnapper….
Anyone remember Survivors?
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Isn’t the world being run by a secret cabal that thinks that “Invasion of the Daleks” is a training video?
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On topic, not too impressed with what is going on there…all I can say really.
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