The presence of mycotoxin in Canadian grain because of fusarium head blight costs the grain industry at least $1.5 billion a year in diminished export and domestic sales, a United States expert said last week.
Felicia Wu, of the University of Pittsburgh and the Rand Corp., told a Canadian workshop on fusarium that losses in export markets are between $500 million and $1 billion annually. Domestically, she estimated losses between $240 and $540 million.
Meanwhile, an Agriculture Canada wheat researcher said the race to develop new fusarium-resistant varieties should receive more support.
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Wheat breeder Stephen Fox said that Wu’s estimates of the cost of the disease should be a signal that not enough resources are being allocated to develop fusarium-resistant varieties of spring wheat for prairie production.
The researcher from the Winnipeg-based Cereal Research Centre said it is clear more resources should be dedicated because fusarium resistance will be a feature of any new wheat varieties registered for use on the Prairies.
He said more focus and resources should be allocated to the research programs at the University of Saskatchewan and the Agriculture Canada research centre at Swift Current, Sask.
“If we want to keep fusarium head blight at bay in Western Canada, we should be doing more,” Fox told the workshop. “I don’t think we should feel bad about dumping a bit more money into fusarium research.”
Wu said the losses come because infected grain is not fit for market or is downgraded in quality, reduced from food to feed grade.
“And realistically, the cost is higher than that,” she said after her speech. “A lot of infected grain is never put into the market. It is plowed under or fed to animals or passed off to a neighbour but never put into the market, so that also is a loss.”
She said the loss estimates are based on the assumption that while there are no universal trade rules on acceptable fusarium-affected content in export grain, Canada adheres to a standard of no more than one milligram of infected grain per kilogram of product. The U.S. is proposing that the standard be double that while the European Union is suggesting it be half that.
“I think the one milligram standard is pretty well accepted as the emerging standard and it is a realistic standard to make cost assumptions about Canada,” she said. “Canada is very scrupulous about the quality of grain it sends into markets. It does not want to send crappy grain into the trade. It has higher standards.”
