The environmental agency in New Zealand, the Environmental Risk Management Authority (ERMA), is imposing draconian strictures on researchers undertaking the most basic of manipulations of genetic material. ERMA makes no distinctions between experiments performed for release and those conducted in contained laboratories. Furthermore, ERMA requires centralized and costly relicensing of what, by international standards, would be judged the most routine experiments with the slightest of changes to protocols. The use of biological materials from international collaborators is, in effect, banned by the imposed necessity for New Zealand researchers to pay $1400 per application to import GM organisms.