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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 13 Hansard (26 November) . . Page.. 4635 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

applicants, Bayer Crop Science, has breached its licence conditions at a much smaller trial site near Wagga. New South Wales Greens MLC Ian Cohen has pointed out that the contamination by GM canola in a trial plot of adjoining wheat paddocks has confirmed non-GM farmers' greatest fears. I quote:

Bayer has clearly breached its exemption order and failed to contain a trial GM crop less than a hectare in size. It is now seeking another exemption order to conduct a hundred further trials, each 50 hectares in size. This would be an outrageous risk and cannot be approved.

This breach by Bayer is embarrassing for the Agriculture Minister and the Premier as both have supported the need for ongoing trials of GM crops and played down the risks of cross-contamination.

Mr Cohen said the breach, the first under a three-year moratorium on commercial GM crops in NSW, dispels any doubts about contamination of non-GM crops.

Farmers are at risk. Their livelihoods are at stake and export markets are under threat. The government simply cannot continue to ignore contamination of non-GM crops by GM organisms.

Mr Cohen said there should be no further trials of GM crops. "The biotech companies have conducted trials in the past and already have enough research data to evaluate and report on the risks involved with GM crops."

"This information must be made public so that any future proposals to release GM crops are carefully, and openly, considered."

"If approved this [proposed] 'trial' would make a mockery of the three-year moratorium now in place. A 5,000-hectare trial is far too large to be anything other than a commercial crop."

The notion that it is possible to trial a crop in open country, when the impact or interaction of the organism on the environment and on the community is unknown, is a fallacy. The better-safe-than-sorry principle means that we must ensure that environmental release, intentional or otherwise, does not occur.

It is important to articulate in this debate a little of what we might be sorry about if we are not prepared to take a stronger line. The point is that there is no structure set up by this regime to protect organic and non-GM farmers from the economic impact on them if GMOs which are released do cross-fertilise with their products.

Economic impact, if you recall, is specifically excluded from consideration by the regulator and there is no insurance to cover farmers, organic or otherwise, if they need to deal with superweeds that are resistant to usual herbicides and require considerably greater expense to manage. There might be economic benefits to the businesses that provide the seeds and chemicals that have been developed so effectively to depend on each other, but there can be no assurance that local farmers and local industries will not end up with higher costs. The deconstruction of rural and regional communities through the application of changed agricultural economics is an old story around Australia and around the world. The introduction of new, tightly controlled crops and associated chemicals is likely to accentuate this process.

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