Hope Not Hype - Third World Network

Presence
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Box 4.1: Unauthorized GM corn in New Zealand in 2003
A shipment of sweetcorn grown in the Gisborne (North Island) region of New Zealand
in 2003 was rejected from Japan because an independent testing company detected
GM material. Subsequent testing in Australia confirmed the Japanese results and identified
at least one of the events as Bt11 (an event owned by the Syngenta Corporation
and designed to confer pest resistance and herbicide tolerance).
Bt11 is not approved for cultivation in New Zealand. At that time, a second GMO was
detected but not identified even to the level of a specific type of modification (Heinemann
et al., 2004). The New Zealand Food Safety Authority concluded that because the
“[c]oncentration of [the] GM organism [was] less than 0.05 percent…well below the
Australia/New Zealand standard for unintentional presence of 1 percent…no further
action” – that is, testing, monitoring or recalling food contaminated by the unknown
organism – was required (Heinemann et al., 2004). Subsequently, all remaining seed
was seized and destroyed. However, New Zealand law, like Europe (Devos et al., 2005),
has no threshold levels of safety for unidentified GMOs (Heinemann et al., 2004). Had
the Food Safety Authority taken that into account, gene flow could have caused a recall
of sweetcorn in New Zealand.
The evidence used by New Zealand regulators leaves open the possibility that the contaminating
GMO is an uncharacterized pre-commercial outcross of the same species, a
novel organism that has more than one modification including the one detected, a novel
outcross that arose when an unintentional and uncharacterized DNA insert on another
chromosome of a GMO was acquired by a previously unmodified conspecific, or an
unknown organism engineered to attract the Bt11 event-specific primers used in the
PCR tests and thus tempt regulators to look no further.
The source of the GM material was never confirmed, but it is suspected that the seed
imported from the US was the source, despite it having passed tests in the US before
shipment to New Zealand. This would be of no surprise since most “crops are not
grown under confined conditions, and the supply chains are rarely
segregated…adventitious mixing of GM material with non-GM produce can occur in
all the steps of production and supply chains” (Devos et al., 2005, p. 73). A small
number of GM plants were probably in the seed due to pollen flow during seed production
or mixing of seeds, and then the seed was a vector for gene flow to New Zealand
where the GM material was amplified during cultivation in New Zealand. This example
of trade disruptions, and the cost to local farmers and ambiguities in liability of
seed companies or cultivating countries, provides an acute example of the impacts of
presence of GMOs in food and/or feed.