Canada’s canola growers are concerned that a private bill from an NDP member of Parliament could chase away research investment.
Rick White, general manager of the Canadian Canola Growers Association, told growers attending Crop Production Week that Bill C-474 would make Canada’s regulatory approval system for genetically modified crops look more like Europe’s.
“We strongly encourage Canada to stick to our guns on science based regulatory processes. Keep the politics out of it,” he said.
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Bill C-474, proposed by British Columbia NDP MP Alex Atamanenko, would add a market impact analysis to the GM crop approval system.
The bill was scheduled to be debated in the House of Commons on Feb. 3 but was delayed when Parliament was prorogued.
White is concerned the bill could gain support because the politics surrounding GM crops seems to be heating up again.
“We’ve even got the Conservative government saying, ‘Yes, we believe you but the heat is hot here. We can’t just do nothing.’”
He told growers they could lose the agronomic and economic benefits GM crops have delivered to the canola industry if Canada moves from a science-based system to one based on an assessment of potential economic harm.
Crop developers would be wary of spending money and time on developing new crops, he said.
“If you can see that there’s a political thumbs up/thumbs down process at the end of it, I sure wouldn’t put my money into that R&D anymore,” said White.
He said that government should ensure there is no need for a market impact assessment by negotiating low-level presence tolerance levels for GM crops. And the perfect place to begin those negotiations is in the ongoing Canada/European Union bilateral trade agreement talks.
White believes there is support for that idea from Conservatives and Liberals but he doubts the NDP would be receptive to anything short of revamping the regulations.
But one NDP stalwart who attended Crop Production Week likes the idea of establishing tolerance levels.
“There needs to be some allowance for genetically modified material because we’re into it. We’re not starting from square zero,” said Saskatchewan NDP leader Dwain Lingenfelter.
The farmer and former agriculture minister said there must be a middle ground in the GM crop debate, a balance between the interests of farmers and consumers.
“That’s why the extremes of the debate don’t appeal to me very much.”
Lingenfelter also believes the province needs to play a more active role when growers lose markets for their crops due to concerns over GM contamination, such as what recently happened to the flax industry.
“Our premier and our ministers of trade and agriculture should be very much involved in that discussion and I think they’re far too quiet,” he said.
