GE Pine Tree Information Seriously Flawed

The ERMA hearing set down for 9th November to consider an application to grow GE pines "should be postponed until the information supplied by the applicant, Scion, is able to be independently verified," says Susie Lee of GE Free NZ,

"The application and evaluation report is riddled with poor and misleading information that is not at all scientific and opens the country's economy and environment to serious risk".

The Crown research institute Scion are applying to grow 4000 GE pine trees
in a field trial at a secret site in Rotorua, the heart of commercial
pine plantation research.  Previous secret GE sites have been found to be
in breach of their controls and GE free believe the public have a
right to know where trials are being conducted, even if just to keep the
inspectors and operators of the trial honest.

"How are 4000 trees going to be monitored properly when previous trials of just 40 GE trees could not be adequately looked after, nor the facility fences kept secure?" says Ms. Lees.

The application is littered with erroneous and unscientific assertions, including the claim that pine pollen only disperse for 300 meters.  GE Free NZ has only just received a summary of data on Horizontal GeneTransfer (HGT) which was reported by the applicant as not occurring.  The summary data is so badly corrupted that no conclusions could be deduced. Independent expert assessment of the data was unable to make any credible evaluation and this raises suspicions that the lack of validity in the data is the reason why they were not submitted for scientific inspection with the original application.

GE Free NZ is extremely concerned that ERMA has not picked up these annomolies in its evaluation and review report on this application.

"The conflicts that plague regulatory Authorities are not new but now risk
severely compromising their role of protecting the environment and the public good," says Ms. Lees.

"We hope that the ERMA's hearing committee is not riddled with the same conflicts of interest that caused the previous chair of the ERMA's GE decision-committee to resign, or as revealed at the European Food Safety Authority, where the chair has resigned having been found to have been on the boards of GE corporations.