If you want to know the Manitoba Forage Council’s stance on Roundup Ready alfalfa, it’s not hard to decipher, because its position is anything but grey.
According to the Council’s December newsletter, the organization wants a moratorium on all Canadian trials of genetically modified alfalfa and all stands of the crop destroyed.
“We want the CFIA (Canadian Food Inspection Agency) to respond to this and have Monsanto rip up existing fields, while they (CFIA) do an economic analysis of the impact (of GM alfalfa),” said Jim Lintott, chair of the forage council, who grows seed and raises cattle close to Oakbank, Man., 25 kilometres northeast of Winnipeg.
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As reported in The Western Producer in May 2008, Monsanto is conducting field trials on GM alfalfa at 20 locations in Canada, but the product is not commercially for sale.
How the CFIA responds to the council’s request, and if GM alfalfa ever becomes a commercial product in this country, may depend on the contents of a U.S. Department of Agriculture environmental impact (EI)study published in the next few weeks.
“They’re going to have the release of the EI by the end of January or early February,” said Pat Trask, who runs Trask Family Seeds in Elm Springs, South Dakota, which is in the western part of the state, near Rapid City.
Trask is especially interested in USDA’s conclusions on GM alfalfa, because he’s one of the co-plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Monsanto and Forage Genetics International – the American company licensed to use Monsanto’s GM technology.
In March 2007 a Federal Court judge in San Francisco ruled in favour of Trask and other seed growers, the Centre for Food Safety and U.S. environmental groups, banning the sale or planting of new GM alfalfa crops, pending the results of an environmental impact study. In his ruling Judge Charles Breyer criticized the USDA for failing to investigate whether conventional and GM alfalfa can co-exist.
“For those farmers, who choose to grow non-engineered alfalfa, the possibility that their crops will be infected with the engineered gene is tantamount to the elimination of all alfalfa,” wrote Breyer in his decision.
The judge’s conclusion is similar to Trask’s belief that the genes of GM alfalfa cannot be contained from conventional crops.
“How long before we no longer, or ever, will we be able to sell conventional alfalfa seed?” said Trask, who sells alfalfa and grass seed grown in the Dakotas and Nebraska. “All of those (varieties) will cease to be grown and sold, because eventually they will be genetically contaminated.”
Trask added that one of the side effects of Roundup Ready technology is that resistance to glyphosate is linked to an increase in fibre production. As the amount of plant fibre increases, Trask said, the protein content and forage value of alfalfa decreases.
“They are releasing a plant into the environment that is inferior to the base species that God put on the earth,” he said.
Similarly, the position of Lintott and the Manitoba Forage Council is that GM alfalfa offers minimal agronomic benefit. And the cost will be losing the organic market in North America and the forage seed export market to Europe.
Despite those objections, Monsanto Canada spokesperson Trish Jordan said North American farmers do want GM alfalfa.
“The product was introduced in the U.S. first (in 2005)… and growers quite liked the product,” she said, noting in Canada they’ve had “feedback from some growers who say they’re very interested.”
Jordan said Monsanto has tried to maintain a dialogue with groups that oppose the technology, but she’s troubled by calls for the elimination of field trials in Canada.
“Research and development and field work is absolutely critical to bringing forward new innovations.”
Jordan concedes the future of Roundup Ready alfalfa in Canada is tied to the outcome of the U.S. court case.
“I know for a fact that they (Forage Genetics International) certainly are not going to be making any final commercial decision, with respect to Roundup Ready alfalfa in Canada, until the situation in the U.S. is resolved.”
