Australia's capital territory set to ban GM crops

The Australian Capital Territory, home to CSIRO's Plant Industry division, looks set to join the southern mainland states and Tasmania in imposing a moratorium on the environmental release of genetically modified crops.

The moratorium has rattled the local bioscience research community -- the ACT is one of the Australian biotechnology industry's research hubs.

And new research shows that the government's action does not appear to reflect community sentiment in the ACT. National public opinion surveys by Biotechnology Australia suggest the highly educated ACT community is the least concerned of any in Australia about GM crops and foods. About 73 per cent of people in the ACT expressed confidence in the national regulatory system for GMOs administered by the Office of the Gene Technology Regulator.

A recent survey by the ACT branch of the national biotechnology association, AusBiotech, estimated that bioscience research and development and commercial activity are worth at least AUD$100 million annually to the ACT economy.

Canberra's Black Mountain is home to one of the world's leading plant biotechnology research institutions, CSIRO Plant Industry, and to CSIRO Entomology, which is developing GM microbes for bioremediation. The Australian National University's Research School of Biological Sciences and the John Curtin School of Medical Research are also nationally important bioscience research centers in the region.

The Cooperative Research Centre for Pest Animal Control is also headquartered in Canberra. The CRC is developing revolutionary technologies to sterilise pest mammals like the house mouse, rabbit and fox, using genetically modified viruses and bacteria.

Because CSIRO's bioscience research divisions, and Canberra's two universities, are on commonwealth land, they are likely to be exempt from moratorium imposed by the territory government. But any field trials of GM crops on sites like CSIRO Plant Industry's Ginninderra Experiment Farm would risk being characterised as defying the wishes of the community's elected government.

Double-barrelled

The ACT Legislative Assembly is scheduled to vote later this month on two bills -- one sponsored by Labor's health minister Simon Corbell, the other by Greens politician Kerrie Tucker -- that would both ban the environmental release of experimental GM crops.

Labor's proposed moratorium on GM crops would be retrospective to June 2003, and would end in June, 2006, to coincide with the Carr Labor government's three-year moratorium in NSW.

The Greens' GMO (Environment Protection) Bill 2003 is more Draconian in its proposed scope. Tucker, who is the only Green member of the ACT assembly, and a Greens senate candidate in this year's federal election, has proposed a blanket ban on the environmental release of all genetically modified organisms.

Initially, at least, the proposed Greens' ban would even extend to GM vaccines for human and veterinary use, and trials of experimental gene therapies based on genetically modified human cells or viral vectors.

With seven members in the 16-member assembly, the minority Labor government needs Tucker's support to push the bill through.

Tucker was not available for interview, but issued a written statement saying the Greens' bill reflects concerns with the complementary legislation enacted by the commonwealth and states to regulate GMOs.

"Those concerns are reflected in the report of the legislative assembly health committee inquiry into the Gene Technology Bill, which recommended a moratorium on environmental release of GM organisms," she wrote. "It is not, as many people may have thought, because I or the committee is opposed to gene technology research. As it happens, the majority of the assembly share our concerns."

The Greens were concerned that the regime established by the federal-state legislation would take a "cost effective" approach to the precautionary principle.

Liability for environmental contamination or damage caused by the testing or commercial use of GM products was not sufficiently dealt with, the legislation did not require insurance for any damage caused by such products, and there was no broad appeal process against the licensing of such products.

Nor did the legislation consider social and economic impacts of the introduction of such products to the market.

Tucker says the Greens have had "fairly definitive advice" that the assembly's proposed amendments to the Gene Technology Bill would have seen it declared 'non-corresponding law', resulting in the act losing all of the evaluation and regulatory systems made available through the Office of the Gene Technology Regulator.

So Tucker has drafted a bill that would rule out the environmental release of all GMOs in the ACT, as the starting point for a more highly regulated regime, exclusive to the ACT.

The intention would then be to amend the bill by granting the minister the power to license exceptions from the ban for certain existing GMOs, such as some health products, and some field trials for scientific research.

Local worries

Last week AusBiotech's ACT branch organised a briefing to discuss the bills and their potential impact on the biotechnology industry and research activities.

Dr TJ Higgins, assistant chief of CSIRO Plant Industry, spoke on the potential impact of the bills on research and development. He later told Australian Biotechnology News that while the Greens were concerned that the current national regulatory regime was not stringent enough, they did not specify how it could be made more stringent.

He said that a senior official of the European Commission who visited Australia recently had observed that Australia's regulatory regime was at least as stringent as that in Europe.

Higgins also pointed out to the seminar that millions of dollars spent on research annually could be at risk if the moratorium went ahead. "There's a very high standard of research activity in the ACT, so it has implications not just for the ACT, but nationally and internationally," he said.

Dr David Dall, CEO of Pestat, the spinoff company that will commercialise the immunosterilisation technologies being developed by the CRC for Pest Animal Control, said he had pointed out that the precautionary principle needed to consider the ongoing environmental disaster being caused by feral pests in Australia.

He said those who had real concerns about the Australian environment should not rule out any technology with the potential to deliver such enormous ecological benefits.

"We're not operating in a vacuum. The disaster is happening now, and could at least be ameliorated by using GM organisms," Dall said. "Nothing we have done in the past 150 years has made the slightest difference in controlling pests like foxes and mice. Mouse plagues come and go, and Australia suffers direct damage worth $33.6 million a year, rising to $60 million in a plague year.

"Just saying no to GM is easy, but it is neither an effective nor hopeful approach if nobody has the faintest idea of how to control pests by other means."