About nine years ago, researchers at the Agriculture Canada research station in Saskatoon began work on the oddly named, genetically modified plant called hairy canola.
Today, after all that time and plenty of investment, this new line is still sitting on the shelf.
Hairy canola is particularly promising for a number of reasons, primarily that flea beetles hate it. The flea beetle, as canola growers know, is a primary threat to their yields. The tiny hairs covering the seedling are obnoxious to the beetles, which can’t find enough bare surface area to feed on the plant.
Read Also
Proactive approach best bet with looming catastrophes
The Pan-Canadian Action Plan on African swine fever has been developed to avoid the worst case scenario — a total loss ofmarket access.
The enormous upside to hairy canola, then, is that pesticides as seed treatments would be either much less or not at all necessary to combatting flea beetles.
From both input cost and environmental perspectives, this hairy trait could be highly beneficial, because much of the canola seed planted in Western Canada now must be coated with insecticide.
Hairy canola could reduce or remove the use of neonicotinoids, seed treatments suspected of contributing to bee deaths. There is also some evidence that neonics are not working as well as they once did in fighting off the flea beetle, which seems to have evolved enough to resist the pesticide.
If that proves to be the case, what will growers’ next tool be in battling flea beetles? If it is not hairy canola, it will be another pesticide.
Yet the commercialization of hairy canola is in limbo, and the reasons are complex. First of all, new varieties of canola containing GM traits are expensive to take to market.
Estimates range from $40 million to well over $100 million, in large part because of a challenging regulatory system.
No one wants new varieties to sail through a regulatory process.
But there are differing views on whether the regulatory system has been made more difficult because of public outcry against GM foods.
Most industry players would agree that, good or bad, regulations are complex and expensive and the process is lengthy.
Because the costs are daunting, seed companies are much less excited about commercializing such beneficial varieties if there is not another revenue stream to help them recoup their investment.
In the early days of GM canola development, pesticide resistance was the dominant push, allowing companies to sell the pesticide along with the seed. Hairy canola does not offer that return.
So, where will the technology go? It has been funded by SaskCanola, the Alberta Canola Producers, the Canola Council of Canada, and others. Has all of that investment gone to waste?
It’s possible. Pat Flaten, research manager at SaskCanola, is of the view that this trait may well not be commercialized because crop science companies are interested in “blockbuster” traits.
“The seed industry has said that only transformative transgenic approaches will really be considered,” Flaten said.
That leaves government, perhaps in concert with producer groups, to manage the commercialization problem. As it stands, there is no well-travelled path to commercialization without the big seed companies.
But if they are not interested, and the trait is highly beneficial to the economy, consumers and farmers, there should be a role for government to assist and expedite its trip to market.
Indeed, it appears that hairy canola research must start all over again, using traditional breeding methods instead of genetic modification to avoid the novel trait process.
All those years of researchers’ time and all that money, some of it farmers’ money, will have been wasted. The process is deeply flawed, and it’s on the government — repository of policy and regulation — to fix it.
