Genetically modified crop trials have failed to take off in New Zealand for reasons other than the strict legal barriers blamed by developers, the Sustainability Council says.

[...] the “think tank” found the drop in the number of GM field trials was mainly due to other factors, such as loss of funding and technical difficulties. Sustainability Council executive director Simon Terry said state-funded research and development programmes had once promised to bring GM fruit, vegetables, pasture grasses and livestock to New Zealand fields and tables. Since the 1980s, tens of millions of dollars of public science funding had gone into developing GM organisms, mostly to CRIs.