Canadian farm sector representatives say Europe is on the verge of loosening, if ever so slightly, its ban on importing feed shipments with trace amounts of unapproved genetically modified material.
After travelling to Europe on a trade mission in late January with agriculture minister Gerry Ritz, they say European Union officials and politicians are beginning to understand that GM crops are here to stay and part of the solution for world hunger.
“We pressed home very clearly that for trade to continue, there needs to be an effective low-level presence policy so we can have predictable trade,” Grain Growers of Canada executive director Richard Phillips said during a telephone news conference with Ritz from Morocco.
“I think we pressed that home very clearly and I know that they heard us.”
Dennis Stephens, secretary of the Canada Grains Council who also travelled with the minister, told CGC members in a Jan. 28 email that the European Commission will consider a proposal this month to increase the acceptable unapproved GMO content threshold in feed imports from .01 percent to 0.1 percent.
In meetings with European ministers and senior officials, Ritz last week urged that the threshold be raised even more and that the rule also apply to food products.
Stephens, who praised the agriculture minister’s campaign on the issue, said even the minor movement proposed is important.
“Such a policy would significantly reduce the possibility of detecting dust particles from one commodity contaminating a shipment of another commodity, such as the detection of corn dust in soybean shipments that stopped soybean trade from North America last year,” he said. “Minister Ritz’s meetings in Europe have been extremely important.”
Ritz told the news conference that he used a meeting of agriculture ministers in Berlin and meetings in Brussels with EU officials to press the argument that only “free and unfettered trade” will help the economy and allow the world to feed an additional two billion people in the decades ahead.
And that includes trade rules that allow unavoidable low-level GMO content in shipments, even into countries that have not approved the GMO trait.
