By Jarrod Booker

A Crown science institute admits it made serious errors by allowing a
controversial genetic engineering trial to breach its strict safety
requirements.

However, Crop & Food Research believes the environment was at very little
risk from its mistakes, and has rejected calls by anti-GE campaigners for
such trials to be shut down.

MAF Biosecurity New Zealand is considering what action to take after the
breaches at a site in Lincoln, near Christchurch, where a 10-year trial
growing genetically modified vegetables with natural pesticides is under
way.

Campaigners found plants that had regrown after the harvesting season when
they should have been destroyed, and plants where the flowers had opened
exposing their GE pollen when this was not permitted.

Anti-GE lobbyists say the breaches show the dangers of allowing such
research, and New Zealand's environment could suffer for it.

"Each of the opened flowers will have released pollen into the environment
and GE seed pods on non-GE [plants] as a result of this negligence," said
Steffan Browning of the Soil and Health Association of New Zealand.

Crop & Food spokesman Roger Bourne said its GE trials were on hold while it
figured out how things went wrong.

"I'm not going to try to downplay it. It's a big deal to break these
controls. They are put in place, people trust us to follow them."

"But on the other hand, we are very comfortable that the environmental risk
is very low in this instance."

A Biosecurity NZ spokeswoman said it was looking at what measures to take
over the breaches at Lincoln, which it regarded as serious.
www.checkbiotech.org