Demonstrators of all ages, including many parents with young children, took to the streets in main city and town centres across the North and South Islands to protest against the lifting of the moratorium on the commercial growing of GE foods, mostly agricultural crops, at the end of October.

Auckland, New Zealand's largest city where nearly half the country's four million population live, saw the largest turnout, with organisers estimating around 30,000 people marched up the main street chanting anti-GE slogans, banging drums and carrying banners.

While police estimated the crowds were considerably smaller at 15,000, many eye-witnesses told AFP the event was one of the biggest-ever public protests, and on a par with mass anti-nuclear marches of the early 1980s and anti-Vietnam marches of the 1960s.

Whether Saturday's protest has any impact on the government's stance remains to be seen.

Describing the turn-out as "a history-defining event," Steve Abel, spokesman for environmental watchdog Greenpeace, one of the march organisers, said Prime Minister Helen Clark's government is choosing to ignore the strength of public opposition to the issue at its own peril.

"The battle is to keep New Zealand GE-free," he said.

Producing GE foods would contradict New Zealand's international "clean, green" image that agriculture exporters and tourist operators have banked on.

Groups as diverse as food producers, organic farmers, scientists, artists and musicians, and businesses have lobbied the government to extend the moratorium.

Abel said those opposed to genetically engineered food would not go away. Many had signed a pledge to take direct action against any applications for GE crop production.

Alannah Currie, spokeswoman for another group, Mothers Against Genetic Engineering (Madge), said before the march that Clark "got this issue wrong."

"There will be people there marching who have never marched in their lives, we will not go away, this is only going to get bigger," she told the New Zealand Herald Saturday.

New Zealand musicians Friday added their voice to the anti-GE call, donating songs to the "Hang on Helen" CD, which will be given away to people who send a "Hang on Helen" postcard to the Prime Minister.

Anti-GE protesters stripped naked outside Parliament this week, while Madge members turned up topless inside Parliament last month to protest against the lifting of the GE moratorium.

Some 69 percent of New Zealanders oppose the government's decision, saying that not enough is known about the long-term consequences of altering the genetic composition of plants, according to a recent Herald-Digi poll.

TERRA.WIRE