Once released to the environment, new organisms (including both GMOs and imported species) are no longer considered ‘new’. Currently, they are not subject to the HSNO Act and can be used freely by anyone, anywhere in the country. There is no intermediate stage between release and field-test, where new organisms must be held in containment. Some problems have been raised with this approach, such as the inability to carry out research on the environmental effects of a new organism in less contained conditions, or to monitor the impacts of organisms after they are released, or to limit their location (for example, to facilitate the co-existence of GM and conventional or organic agriculture).
4.1 Summary
The Royal Commission recommended that the HSNO Act be amended to provide for an additional category of approval, called ‘conditional release’ (Recommendation 6.8). This would allow ERMA to attach controls to approvals to release new organisms. The Royal Commission suggested that conditional release be used “as a further assurance of safety to enhance the management of risk”.
Work on conditional release is at a relatively early stage, and this section seeks your response to the options and proposals discussed below. However, if the category is introduced, certain things are clear:
- ERMA would not be able to release any organism that breached the minimum environmental standards
- ERMA would still have to carry out a full risk assessment of the organism, including consideration of the ability of the organism to establish an undesirable self-sustaining population (and the ease of eradication if it did so), and
- conditional release would not replace full release, and the ability for ERMA to approve organisms without controls would remain.
Various uses have been suggested for conditional release, including enabling certain research outside strict containment, monitoring for impacts of released organisms, limiting the dissemination of the organism or its ability to persist, and controlling where and how organisms are used. Examples of possible controls include granting approval for extended field trials to a single user and stipulating how and where the research can be carried out; requiring monitoring of the effects of the organism on non-target organisms; requiring buffer zones, post-harvest segregation and identification of GM crops; and limiting the use of certain organisms to trained individuals only.
Compliance with and enforcement of controls on release would be an important issue, and possible measures to maximise and check compliance are discussed. The section also covers how the legislation could guide ERMA in setting controls. Guiding principles could stipulate, for example, that controls should be cost-effective and practicable, relevant to the organism, and enforceable. Finally the financial implications of introducing a new category of release are discussed.
In presenting options, the section includes the range of possible uses for a conditional release category. Feedback is sought on which if any of these possible uses should be allowed and whether there are other situations where conditional release should be used.
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4. Conditional release
September 2002
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