Why Chance takes no chances on GM

Western Australia's agriculture minister, Kim Chance, is taking what many are now seeing as an overly cautious stance on biotechnology. Graeme O'Neill reports.

Last month, WA agriculture minister Kim Chance appointed a ministerial reference group to advise him on issues relating to GM crops.

The group, to be chaired by parliamentary secretary Tony McRae, comprises representatives from the agricultural and agbiotech industries, academia, the WA public service, anti-GM groups, and the organic agriculture industry. The minister said it would help to inform the WA government on the current status of GM crop technology and its relevance to WA, and provide advice on the effect of state's ongoing moratorium on GM crops.

One of the group's members is agbiotech pioneer Dr Ian Edwards, who also heads AusBiotech's agbiotech group. But it doesn't appear as if he is looking forward to the role -- the reference group, Edwards fears, may be no more than a sop to the government's critics. Chance, Edwards says, can now claim he is consulting with industry experts, but meanwhile continue to block GM crops and the development of an agricultural biotechnology industry in WA.

Credibility

He's not alone. Earlier this month, Nature Biotechnology took Chance to task for funding a supposedly independent study of the health effects of GM food crops by an Adelaide research institute renowned for its anti-GM activism.

Edwards feels Chance, and other state ministers who have imposed moratoria on biotech crops, has helped to undermine the credibility of the federal Office of the Gene Technology Regulator (OGTR). Chance's latest action does nothing to dispel Edwards' doubt. "What rights do the states have to make determinations on health and safety issues when this is the province of the federal regulatory authorities?" he says. "If the states have concerns over how the federal regulatory agencies are doing their job, it is their responsibility to make submissions to help strengthen the regulatory regime."

Just before the WA state election a year ago, Chance rebuffed a request by AusBiotech for a meeting to discuss the state's moratorium on biotech crops, saying it would be improper because the government was in caretaker mode. Yet on the same day, he wrote to prominent anti-GM activist Julie Newman, of the Network of Concerned Farmers, an anti-GM lobby group, detailing the government's position on the moratorium. Newman immediately posted it on the NCF web site.

Australian Biotechnology News has sought an interview with Chance since September, without success.

Chance is already on record as stating that he would not eat GM foods unless his survival depended on it. His announcement in November that the WA government would fund an independent study into the health effects of GM foods in a rodent model caused consternation in his department and the research community.

In the latest episode, Chance issued a media release in response to a CSIRO decision to stop work on a GM pea variety. The transgenic pea, which contained a transgene for a protein that deters attack by the pea weevil, caused mild allergic response in the lungs of mice fed on the peas.

CSIRO halted the 10-year research project soon as it detected the problem, and issued a press release saying that its decision affirmed the efficacy of the self-regulatory system developed by agbiotech R&D community.

But Chance said the results of the GM pea study showed the need for 'thorough and independent feeding studies on GM foods", and announced that his government would commission independent animal feeding studies on GM foods. He said the WA government was funding the study out of concern that when a gene is transferred between plants, the expressed protein may differ from the original.

Expert committee

Chance did not reveal the amount of the grant, nor its recipient, but it has since emerged that the grant is for around $75,000, and is being made to the Adelaide-based Institute of Health and Environmental Research (IHER). IHER was co-founded by Dr Judy Carman, a critic of safety testing of GM crops and foods.

Carman told Australian Biotechnology News that she had approached all state governments, including Queensland, with a proposal to conduct independent safety testing of GM foods, but only WA had accepted.

She said IHER would be advised by an expert steering committee of "very senior, internationally recognised people", including professors of medicine and veterinary science, on which GM foods should be tested, and what endpoints should be measured, and said the research would be subjected to normal refereeing and published in the peer-reviewed literature.

"Our interest is in the effects of GM crops on health, so we need to have people who are working in human and animal health," she said. "Most of my detractors are plant geneticists who are associated with the GM crop industry. We will be informed by information in the peer-reviewed literature and the 'grey literature'.

"If we find adverse effects -- and we may find that everything is fine and dandy -- then we might conduct an epidemiological study."

Carman, a former senior epidemiologist with the South Australian Department of Health, and now an affiliate senior lecturer with the University of Adelaide, said she had worked in a variety of research fields, including laboratory science, and animal and human research.

She said she had been employed in a variety of fields in research, academia and public health, and described herself as "a renaissance person" with considerable experience in laboratory research. Her co-directors are Dr Kate Clinch-Jones, a medical doctor, and plant molecular geneticist Dr Phillip Davies.

Carman said the institute would not establish its own research facilities, and would hire established, accredited animal facilities instead. It will work in collaboration with a variety of other researchers with laboratories, and with expertise in fields such as histology.

Carman is critical of Food Science Australia New Zealand's practice of relying on summary reports of in-house food-safety testing by companies that develop GM crops, like Monsanto and Bayer, instead of analysing the raw data from such trials. She said FSANZ had been "fairly antagonistic" towards her questioning of its methods. FSANZ often did no more than compare the composition of the GM food with that of its conventional equivalent, and required no animal or human testing before deciding that GM foods were safe to eat "for generations".

Where animal-feeding studies were carried out, they often involved feeding animals the purified protein synthesised in transgenic bacteria, Carman said - not from the GM plant itself. If any animals died within two weeks, they were autopsied, but this usually went no further than weighing vital organs.

Confidence

Meanwhile, the industry is worried that the WA government's decision risks further damage to consumer and producer confidence in Australia's regulatory system for GM crops and foods, already among the most stringent in the world.

Under complementary federal-state legislative arrangements that took nearly a decade to develop, the states cannot ban, on safety or environmental grounds, GM crops or foods that have approved for commercial release and consumption by the OGTR and Food Standards Australia and New Zealand (FSANZ). States may only ban new GM crops where they have concerns about their economic impacts.

Chance's decision challenges this separation of powers. The current moratoria on GM herbicide-tolerant canola in WA, SA, NSW, Victoria, Tasmania and the ACT, were ostensibly instituted on economic grounds -- although electoral considerations clearly intruded.