Reports of food containing a de-registered genetically modified flax variety continue to filter in from Europe in the wake of the first notification issued on Sept. 8 that shut down trade with Canada’s largest flax customer.
The European Commission’s Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed has issued four more notifications of suspected contamination from CDC Triffid.
The GM flax variety that was approved for food, feed and environmental release in Canada and distributed to seed growers in the 1990s has been showing up in cereals and baking mixtures in Germany.
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Triffid was de-registered at the behest of the flax industry in 2001. Regulators believe all seed produced by seed growers was crushed in Canada and that none made it into the commercial farm system.
But eight years later, the unapproved variety has shown up in food products in five German states, according to tests conducted by European labs. Those products were made with flax from Canada and in one case from Canada and the United States.
Canadian flax industry and government officials say the European lab results are inconclusive. Researchers are working on a surefire test that will determine whether Triffid has somehow contaminated Canadian flax supplies.
Meanwhile, trade with a region that took 80 percent of last year’s exports has completely dried up.
“It’s on hold. There are no orders and no interest,” said Barry Hall, president of the Flax Council of Canada.
Pressure is mounting on the industry to resolve the trade impasse with Europe as farmers are poised to harvest what is expected to be a good quality and above-average crop of 900,000 to 950,000 tonnes.
Hall said they can’t initiate discussions with the commission until they have a better grasp on what is causing the positive test results in Europe.
Everything hinges on a protocol being developed by the National Research Council of Canada’s Plant Biotechnology Institute. It will provide a definitive answer as to whether or not Triffid has somehow seeped into the supply chain.
“That is taking longer than we had hoped,” said Hall.
Faouzi Bekkaoui, associate director of research with the Plant Biotechnology Institute, said the work has been complicated by the fact that Triffid was developed when it was not mandatory to characterize the flanking sequence, so his team has to find out exactly what was done.
It could take one to two weeks to develop a test that isolates the unique DNA sequence in Triffid and another two weeks or more to validate it.
“In the ideal situation, it could be a month. But it could be longer,” said Bekkaoui.
CFIA looks at seed
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency is doing some preliminary detective work by looking for genetic markers in the seed supply that would indicate the presence of some type of GM crop.
The agency has not found anything to date in the breeder seed and will turn its attention to certified seed stock this week.
If they find a sample containing the marker, it will be further tested to see if it contains Triffid using the looming PBI protocol. It is possible the source of contamination in Europe is GM canola, corn or soybeans.
Remi Gosselin, spokesperson for the Canadian Grain Commission, said the European labs are using what’s called a construct specific method for their testing, which looks for a portion of the foreign DNA inserted into a plant genome.
PBI is developing an event specific test, which looks for the presence of the entire DNA sequence that is unique to a certain GM crop.
“The event specific method is considered in the industry to provide the most accurate results,” Gosselin said.
Hall said the PBI test will also be used on harvest samples, so growers may be asked to provide more samples than usual this fall.
