When Monsanto parked Roundup Ready wheat it put the brakes on biotech research in Canada, says a spokesperson for the biotech industry.
Research is still happening here but the pace has slowed compared to China and Brazil where aggressive biotech programs have led to useful developments in crops like rice and soybeans.
“We’re going to be out of the picture before too long if we’re not careful. We are losing ground, there’s no doubt about that,” said Denise Dewar, executive director of plant biotechnology with CropLife Canada.
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Dewar’s association represents a number of global biotech companies who paid close attention to Monsanto’s spring announcement to delay the commercialization of its herbicide tolerant wheat.
In the immediate aftermath of the decision some of CropLife’s global member companies switched all their development efforts out of wheat and into rice.
“Wheat was shelved and rice is the new king and Canadian farmers aren’t going to get to take advantage of rice,” said Dewar.
Patty Rosher, senior program manager at the Canadian Wheat Board, an agency that was instrumental in delaying the commercialization of Roundup Ready wheat, doesn’t buy the argument that one failed project was so detrimental to the industry.
Besides, she considers what transpired to be the fault of biotech boosters. Had proponents come forward with a better prototype for their first foray into genetically modified wheat it would not have met with such resistance, said Rosher.
“If there is a product that comes along that is truly beneficial, then we’ll be able to put our weight behind it as a single-desk marketer.”
For instance, Syngenta’s fusarium resistant wheat offers farmers significant agronomic benefits, said Rosher.
“If there is market acceptance and we can segregate for the non-GM wheat markets, then we would support the introduction of that product.”
Market acceptance could still be an issue with fusarium resistant wheat but Rosher doesn’t see it being the deal-breaker it was with Monsanto’s product because buyers will be able to reap some of the rewards of a biotech crop that significantly reduces the cost of production.
The wheat board would be willing to take on some of the risks of implementing a costly segregation system for a crop that offers farmers such an agronomic advantage, which would further mitigate buyer objections, said Rosher.
That’s why the board continues to push hard for reasonable trade rules and voluntary labelling laws for GM products.
“We’re leaders in a lot of ways in market preparation strategies so that we can take advantage of biotechnology for the right product,” said Rosher.
Dewar hopes Rosher is right, that the opportunity to commercialize biotech wheat has only been delayed and not lost. But she gets nervous when she sees that for the first time ever China has surpassed Canada in acres seeded to GM crops.
Canada still ranks in the top five in terms of generating value from biotech crops, accounting for $2 billion of the $44 billion global total in 2003-04.
But countries in Asia, Latin America and parts of Africa that are increasingly expanding research programs and adopting new biotech crops could soon oust Canada from that exclusive list.
Dewar doesn’t want to see Canadian growers left behind when it comes to the next wave of biotechnology, which will be introduced by 2015.
That wave is likely to include canola varieties offering better stress tolerance, disease performance and modified oil profiles as well as crops that can be used in bioplastic, biodiesel and pharmaceutical applications.
There is also work going on with the once vilified terminator gene, which was originally intended to shut off a plant’s reproductive gene so farmers would be forced to buy new seed every year.
The sequel, which has been dubbed genetic use restriction technology, is designed to prevent GM volunteer plants from propagating.
“Technology that will prevent gene flow is a good thing, particularly as we get to some of these higher value output traits like pharmaceutical proteins,” said Dewar.
