Options for New Zealand to use genetic technology in response to climate change and restoring nature have been highlighted in a report from The Aotearoa Circle.
The Circle is a public private partnership established to examine New Zealand’s options and opportunities to restore natural environmental capital, working on new and emerging technologies and solutions across land and water.
The report, published by PwC NZ and the group, does not provide specific recommendations on the pathway NZ should take with respect to gene tech, but does compare and contrast NZ’s current position on the technology to that of the rest of the world.
It notes the difficulty NZ researchers face to meet this country’s current criteria for trialling and releasing genetically modified organisms.
However, there are also nine genetically modified food sources that are available in NZ, including GM potatoes soy, wheat, corn and rice.
NZ tends to sit at the extreme end of process approval in terms of caution, alongside the European Union.
Other trading partners, including Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, tend towards a more moderated, tiered approach to gene tech approval.
Only Canada sits at the most liberal end of the approval spectrum, taking a “traits based” approach to the organism, regardless of the process use or change made.
Examples highlighted in the report on the tech that NZ could use include rapid-flowering apple trees, high condensed tannin clovers and sterile Douglas fir trees.
A shift in other countries’ regulatory environment could see the EU move towards more of a tiered risk system.
The report’s scenarios highlight some of the risks facing NZ as other countries start to adopt GE. Alignment with a more tiered risk approach could mean NZ retains its competitive advantage as a food producer, while non-GE products may also meet a specific market niche.
It also paints a scenario where NZ producers cannot meet some environmental standards by 2035 while other global suppliers can, because they have had the advantage of genetic technology to help them achieve that while NZ has not.
Aotearoa Circle CEO Vicki Watson said the intent of the report is to inform recommendations, looking at what NZ could do with the biotechnology options emerging, rather than recommend what should be done.
She said the report’s questions came up in the course of other work the Circle was doing in 2023 looking at NZ’s climate vulnerabilities to its food and agricultural sector. She said it was younger people who had raised questions about what options were available to the country in the course of that work.
