Governments around the world are fast-tracking guidelines that could pave the way for tolerance levels for genetically modified organism contamination.
If successful the new guidelines, which would be voluntary and adopted on a country-by-country basis, would resolve one of the biggest impediments to international trade in grain, oilseeds and pulses.
“From a grain industry point of view this is an important development,” said Canada Grains Council consultant Dennis Stephens.
Without such guidelines, many importers take a zero tolerance approach, where shipments found to contain trace amounts of unapproved GM crops are detained at port or rejected, costing the agriculture sector billions of dollars in lost sales or extra costs.
Read Also
Land crash warning rejected
A technical analyst believes that Saskatchewan land values could be due for a correction, but land owners and FCC say supply/demand fundamentals drive land prices – not mathematical models
Next June, an intergovernmental task force is expected to submit a draft document to the Codex Alimentarius Commission, a United Nations body that develops international food standards and guidelines. The document will outline risk assessment procedures for how to deal with such shipments.
The document is being submitted for approval a year earlier than the grain industry had expected.
Stephens said it could have major implications. He cited an example last year when North American corn exporters refused to ship corn gluten feed and dried distillers grain to Europe because the European Union’s council of ministers refused to approve a GM corn technology called Herculex despite it being approved by the EU’s own scientific laboratory.
Because of the EU’s zero tolerance for unapproved GMOs, the European Feed Manufacturers Association was forced to replace four million tonnes of corn-based feed with more expensive alternatives, which cost Europe’s livestock producers an estimated $2.7 to $4 billion in 2007.
Herculex eventually received the necessary approval on Oct. 24.
If a reasonable tolerance level had been in place, trade would not have been disrupted.
While the proposed new guidelines do not set out specific tolerance levels for GM crops, they provide countries with a tool for developing risk management policies in case of contamination.
Stephens said the guidelines will likely lead to the establishment of specific contamination thresholds.
William Yan, chief of the microbiology evaluation division of Health Canada’s food directorate, helped develop the document.
He said the grain industry was pushing for Codex-based tolerance levels but it was unlikely such a proposal would have achieved consensus. At least if the Codex commission adopts the draft document prepared by the task force, he added, there will be for the first time a set of guidelines for dealing with low-level contamination.
“It may not be the magic bullet that farmers are looking for to address this situation, (but) to me it’s an important first step,” Yan said.
Earl Geddes, vice-president of product development and marketing with the Canadian Wheat Board, hopes the next step will be the establishment of thresholds for GM contamination.
Wheat shipments are occasionally disrupted by the “adventitious presence” issue even though there is no commercial production of GM wheat in North America.
Geddes said dust from ground-up GM corn or soybean hulls occasionally turns up in a wheat shipment, causing headaches.
The existing zero tolerance approach forces wheat shippers to export to countries that have approvals in place for GM corn and soybean contamination.
A 0.9 percent tolerance level would allow 99.9 percent of grain shipments to go through to destination unimpeded.
Stephens said he can’t understand why it is so difficult to establish such a concession for a GM crop that has been through a full Codex-based regulatory review in the exporting country.
“It boggles the mind when you think about it because there are tolerances for every imaginable poison.”
He too hopes the guidelines will lead to the establishment of tolerance levels, perhaps even on a proactive basis.
The intergovernmental task force proposal calls for a UN Food and Agriculture Organization database that will provide importing countries with all the information they need to perform a low-level contamination risk assessment as soon as a GM technology is approved in an exporting country.
The grain industry hopes importers will use the database to conduct risk assessments in advance rather than waiting for the inevitable contamination incident to occur, effectively preventing trade disruptions before they happen.
