7pm 21 April 1997
Shirley Community Centre, Christchurch
attended by approx 100 people

The 100 people at this meeting were there not through the media but through their networking and community concern, began Phillida Bunkle, MP, the Alliance Party Spokesperson.

Her talk dealt with three issues - what genetic engineering is, the risks of genetic engineering and the regulatory and political issues of genetic engineering.

She said that Genetic Engineering creates novel life-forms by introducing DNA from a differetn species thus making it different from say, cross-breeding that can occur in nature.

Phillida Bunkle mentioned mice experiments but acknowledged that she didn't really know what the significance of those were. (So why bother bringing them up?).

She listed the problems of genetic engineering as including the following, using the example of a plant that is resistant to Round-Up pesticide (getting 200 times its normal dose):

• increasing use of pesticides
• genes can spread into other plants of the same family which become resistant and become super-weeds.
• loss of economic comparative advantage
• ethical problems of eating say a tomato with cow genes in it, are you eating a cow or a tomato?
• allergies
• contamination due to the randomness involved in genetic engineering.

In the regulatory section she focussed mainly on the issue of labelling, touching on thhe subjects of GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) and global deregulation meaning that trade restrictions cannot be placed unless there is scientific evidence that it is causing harm, intellectual property rights and the Human Genome Project - where DNA is being patented.

The Australian and New Zealand Food Authority (ANZFA which makes decisions on food regulations has two New Zealand representatives: one is the retired head of netsles, and the other is from the prime Minister's Department and was formerly involved in the manufacturing sector.

Phillida Bunkle's political stance is to call for "labelling" of genetically-engineered foods rather than a ban. She said that this was for politial reasons, that it was more "feasible", that the libertarians would object to banning something, and that market reaction ie "consumer power" would reject genetically-engineered foods. When it was put to her from the audience that a lot of consumers could only afford the least expensive items on the supermarket shelves, she replied that there was no evidence that genetically-engineered foods would be any less expensive - which left unanswered the question of what advantage it would be to the multinational companies to produce genetically-engineered foods if they were to have no competitive advantage?

A GATT Watchdog spokesperson raised the issue of corporate control of the food resources and that patents on the seeds by agricultural companies that also market the pesticides wish to stop farmers switching, and that it was the agricultural and chemical industries working as one.