What’s at Risk if GMO Regulation Goes Light?

New Zealand’s unusual degree of exposure to the economic risks posed by GMOs is the first signal that well founded regulation of their outdoor use is needed.  GMOs are a different type of risk to many other environmental hazards because of their abilities to self-replicate

Economic Considerations Vital:  New Zealand is unusually placed internationally when considering the outdoor use of GMOs as it earns its way in the world primarily through food exports that increasingly target premium markets demonstrating high levels of consumer resistance to GM content.  An assessment of that market position is what prompted Fonterra to inform GM developers in 2009 that it would not support the EPA application they had prepared to seek conditional release of GM ryegrass.  And as dairy pasture made up 86% of the target market for the grasses, it was that commercial stance by Fonterra rather than any regulatory hurdles that meant the prepared applications were shelved.  Through examination of the detail of this and other cases, it is notable that regulation has not been critical to the outdoor use of GMOs failing to proceed – other factors have prevailed.[1]

What these cases demonstrate with respect to GMOs is that the purpose statement of the key statute – the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act (HSNO) – naturally extends to protecting the nation’s livelihood.  This is underlined by HSNO section 6(e) that requires all assessments to take into account economic costs as well as economic benefits.

Safety Issues Warrant Regulation:  GM technologies continue to raise environmental and health issues.  This was highlighted through AgResearch’s application to the Australian regulator in 2023 for field trialling its GM grasses.  The regulator was sufficiently concerned about the risks of an allergen (sesame oleosin) that could be released through the grass’s pollen that it wanted additional research undertaken – fundamental research that meant AgResearch withdrew its application for outdoor trials.[2]

Further afield, new gene editing techniques have encountered a blizzard of studies examining the frequency and scale of off-target effects involving unintended changes to the genome.[3]  A spectacular example of what can happen involved the development of hornless cattle that were engineered using the TALENs technique.  It was the US Food and Drug Administration that identified some 4,000 base pairs of “unexpected” insertions, including bacterial DNA that contained foreign genes conferring resistance to antibiotics. This, despite the developer claiming: “We have all the scientific data that proves that there are no off-target effects.”[4]

When it comes to the environment, the potential for unintended effects expands exponentially and we continue to await studies that will adequately document the effects of the new techniques.  The simple point that leading biosafety scientists make is that the new GMOs “are not present in agricultural plants currently cultivated with a history of safe use, and their underlying physiological mechanisms are not yet sufficiently elucidated.  … and their higher targeting efficiency, i.e., precision, cannot be considered an indication of safety per se, especially in relation to novel traits created by such modifications”.[5]

The risks arising from any use of gene drive techniques and spray on dsRNA are especially concerning.[6]  With respect to the latter, we noted in 2019 that “Off-target effects of dsRNA treatment have the potential to elicit a wide range of genetic changes in the soil biota, which could potentially result in the enhancement of the pathogenic properties of certain classes of soil-resident organisms. … Fruit trees, grape vines, and many types of vegetables are among the potential casualties”.[7]

At the highest level, GMOs are a different type of risk to many other environmental hazards because of their abilities to self-replicate and mutate through interactions in the managed and wild environments – vastly increasing the scope of risk scenarios and the potential scale of harm.  It is distinctions such as these that have led risk scholars to highlight the degree of risk that GMOs as a class represent.  Taleb, who rose to fame as one of the few analysts to have predicted the 2008 financial crash, puts it in these terms:

A lack of observations of explicit harm does not show absence of hidden risks. Current models of complex systems only contain the subset of reality that is accessible to the scientist. Nature is much richer than any model of it.[8]