The developer of a GM flax variety at the heart of a trade imbroglio with Europe rejects an accusation that his carelessness caused the mess.
Alan McHughen, the former University of Saskatchewan Crop Development Centre breeder who created CDC Triffid, has come under fire for what some consider reckless distribution of the GM flax variety.
He handed out small packets of the crop to interested parties in 2000, a year before he voluntarily withdrew registration of the variety.
“I guess there is always a possibility that somebody took one of those packets (and multiplied it) but the amount of seed in that wasn’t even a handful, it was more like a three-finger pinch. So somebody would have gone to a lot of trouble to get a crop out of that,” said McHughen, who is now a professor at the University of California Riverside.
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CDC Triffid was discovered in a number of food products in Europe last month, where there is zero tolerance for unapproved GM crops. That has led to a disruption in trade with Canada’s largest flax customer.
Canadian officials are still developing a test to confirm whether Triffid has entered the handling system.
In the meantime, people are trying to figure out how Triffid could have contaminated flax supplies.
Percy Schmeiser, the farmer from Bruno, Sask., who was found guilty of infringing Monsanto’s Roundup Ready canola patent but not required to pay damages, believes the packets were the root cause.
“I believe it was fully from this flax (McHughen) was giving out that did the contamination,” he said.
McHughen can’t recall how many packets were handed out.
“I couldn’t even hazard a guess. A substantial number but not in the thousands or anything. But more than a few,” he said.
He gave them to anybody who visited the Crop Development Centre and wanted to see what a GM crop looked like or to plant them in their garden to see “the pretty blue flowers.”
The packets were also made available to delegates attending the sixth annual International Symposium on the Biosafety of Genetically Modified Organisms held in Saskatoon in July 2000.
McHughen said the packets were given out under the express condition that they were to be used for educational purposes and not for commercial growing. It was a verbal agreement rather than a signed document.
That didn’t appease growers and traders who were not impressed with what McHughen did.
“This could ruin our market. There’s no point to it at all,” Saskatchewan Flax Development Commission member Terry Boehm said in a July 27, 2000, Western Producer article.
“He’s defying the collective wisdom of the industry and producers.”
McHughen’s recollection is that he stopped handing out the seeds after people “started making a fuss.”
He said spending almost a decade turning a pinch of seeds into a crop would demonstrate a high degree of perseverance and an equally high degree of ignorance because any advantage of growing the herbicide-tolerant crop are long gone. Modern varieties offer far better agronomic performance, he added.
“I just can’t see anybody actually doing that, although it remains a possibility,” McHughen said.
