GUELPH, Ont. – The dean of University of Guelph’s biological science college says the European Union is undergoing a sea change in its attitude toward trace amounts of unapproved genetically modified material.
Michael Emes said it is now time for Canada to follow suit.
Canada has been a leading advocate of allowing low-level presence of GM material in imports, even if it has not been approved in the importing country.
Yet Canadian policy continues to impose a zero tolerance for imports containing unauthorized GM material.
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“With the EU decision now, it forces us to look back at our own regulations and perhaps become more realistic about what we push one way but don’t accept the other way,” he said in an interview after a Feb. 9 appearance before the House of Commons agriculture committee studying the biotechnology industry.
An EU committee with government backing came close last week to endorsing the idea that imported animal feed can have up to 0.1 percent content of unauthorized GM material.
The existing threshold is so low that dust containing GM traces from the walls of a cargo ship have led to shipments of non-GM crops being turned back from EU ports.
“Europe has started to change,” Emes told MPs.
“There are now GM potatoes which will be grown in German, Sweden, and the Czech Republic, and GM maize which is grown in Spain and Portugal with the approval of the EU.”
He said Ireland has just approved GM maize in food and feedstocks.
“So the regulatory landscape is changing in Europe,” he said.
“I have little doubt that more will follow.”
Emes, a Briton who was in the United Kingdom when anti-GMO attitudes hardened in the 1990s, said he watched British consumers panic over the foot-and-mouth disease and BSE outbreaks, which they considered a “failure of agriculture.”
A research paper suggested a link between GM varieties and human health problems, aggressive language such as “Franken foods” was developed and media picked up the scare campaign.
“Then Prince Charles got involved and the rest, as they say, is history.”
He said European attitudes are changing because people are beginning to realize “we are facing some real challenges as we go forward with climate change and food supply. And I think we’ve gotten beyond some of the more pejorative language that was used early on in Europe.”
Emes said there also is a growing understanding that regulations based on absolute purity are unenforceable.
“There is no such thing as zero anything,” he said in the interview.
That is the argument agriculture minister Gerry Ritz has been using in trying to persuade the EU that zero tolerance rules cannot be met by exporters and that it is a trade barrier rather than a health policy.
Yet Rene Van Acker, associate dean of the Guelph plant agriculture department, said that is Canada’s current policy, which could face problems when China begins to try to send product into Canada that contains GM genes not approved here.
“Right now, our policy is a threshold of zero for regulated events,” he told MPs.
“Will we change that? We argue that the Europeans need to change that, but if China, for example, wanted to export something to Canada that would not yet be regulated in Canada, what would our policy be? Currently, our policy is zero.”
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