By Nick Major
Organic farmers have a bill before Parliament to address financial losses they believe could be caused by contamination from genetically modified (GMO) seeds, but not everyone is happy with the proposed law.
“We have to protect our supply source from contamination, and we’ve found that more and more difficult,” said Dag Falck, organic program manager for Nature’s Path Organic in Richmond.
Falck said that when genetically modified canola was introduced in the Prairie provinces in 1999 it contaminated organic canola plants, and some farmers were no longer allowed to market their canola as organic.
Bill C-474 would require that the potential financial harm to organic farmers be considered before any new GMO seed is approved.
“Our feeling is that GMOs in agriculture and in our food supply are not controllable,” Falck said, “and the cost to us of not being able to use that and to all the farmers who lost the ability to grow canola for their cash flow – that was lost – so we feel that bill C-474 is a way to address the financial losses that are predictable and known before another GMO is approved.”
Alex Atamanenko, NDP agriculture critic and BC Southern Interior MP, introduced the one-line private member’s bill in March.
“There’s never been a bill on genetically engineered seeds that’s made it past first reading before,” said Gina Petrakos, legislative assistant for Atamanenko. “Right now [the seed companies] are not required to consider market implications whatsoever. If it passes the health and environmental regulations, that’s all they care about.”
The bill has relevance for B.C.’s fruit industry. According to Joe Sardinha, president of the BC Fruit Growers’ Association, roughly 10% of the provinces’ orchards are organic.
“We don’t support the open field release of GMO fruit varieties in the Okanagan until the government can provide assurances that there won’t be any market fallout from it,” he said, “and that if there is, that they’ll indemnify us from it.”
Canada’s biotech industry is staunchly opposed to the bill.
But Richard Phillips, executive director of Grain Growers of Canada, said Bill C-474 is “a terrible step in the wrong direction.”
He pointed out that Canada already has an extremely strict regulatory system for new crops, be they genetically modified or not.
“Before any new crop can be approved in Canada to be grown it has to pass years of rigorous testing.”
Phillips said the current regulations are already based on health and food safety and that the bill would place too much emphasis on foreign markets.
“What Bill C-474 proposes to do is to open it up to the whims of foreign countries to say what we should or should not grow in Canada.”
Others are concerned that the bill would politicize the seed approval process.
“This bill would remove science from Canada’s regulatory system and substitute the socio-economic criteria,” said Dennis Prouse, vice-president of government affairs for CropLife Canada. “Politics, basically, would now reign supreme in the regulatory system, rather than science.”
Prouse is concerned about the long-term impacts on the Canadian food industry. “Canada’s science base regulatory system has served us exceptionally well, and it’s made Canada a world agricultural leader and a leader in biotech, and we think this would be an exceptionally damaging piece of legislation.”
But Falck said the bill’s demands are modest.
“The bill is not saying you have to consider the criteria [the market impact of GMO on organic farms] and you have to turn it down based on the criteria,” he said. “It just says you have to consider it. It’s almost surprising that someone would spend so much time trying to fight something like this, because it’s a no-brainer.”
While Petrakos said that Canada’s flax market was shut out of the European Union in 2008-09 because it was found to be contaminated with a genetically modified flax called triffid, Phillips pointed out that Canada’s flax council is opposed to the bill.
Prouse added that arguments supporting the bill are based on unproven “what if?” scenarios of organic farmers losing market share.
“We can certainly see very real-life examples of what would happen if Canada adopted a bill like C-474,” he said. “For instance, Canada’s entire canola industry wouldn’t be in existence, because canola is entirely a biotech crop. Under C-474, we couldn’t have ever started the canola industry, because a market assessment could show that gee, there’s some nations that may not accept this.”
Prouse added that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency still has the final say on approving any seeds, and it’s in the biotech companies’ interests to ensure they’re safe.
“It certainly doesn’t make much business sense to bring traits out that would not gain approval and would be damaging. Why would a company wish to do that?”
The bill recently passed second reading in the House of Commons and is now up for debate in the Agriculture and Agri-Food Committee.