The developer of the only genetically modified flax variety to receive regulatory approval in Canada is as flummoxed as everybody else as to how a line that was deregistered eight years ago is suddenly at the centre of a market access firestorm.
On Sept. 8, the European Commission’s Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed issued a notification that a German lab had detected the presence of the unauthorized GM flax FP967 (CDC Triffid) that came into the country from Canada via Belgium. The incident is disrupting flax sales to Europe as growers harvest this year’s crop.
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“The stuff they found in Canadian shipments I find surprising because I think we all agree that nobody wanted to jeopardize the European market,” said Alan McHughen, the man who developed CDC Triffid.
He is skeptical of the finding for a number of reasons.
“The Europeans don’t have the system to distinguish Triffid from other transgenic flax,” he said.
Triffid is the only GM flax that ever received temporary registration but there have been plenty of research trials involving other types of GM flax.
McHughen can’t fathom why anybody would grow and market an outdated variety of GM flax that long ago lost its usefulness, especially when the entire flax industry knows how dangerous that would be.
He created Triffid when he was working at the University of Saskatchewan’s Crop Development Centre in the late 1980s to solve a rotation problem prairie wheat growers had encountered.
At that time, Glean was a popular herbicide used by wheat growers. In certain parts of the Prairies, the sulfonylurea herbicide wouldn’t break down in the soil, forcing growers to fallow the land or to grow wheat on wheat.
Using genetic modification, McHughen was able to create a flax variety tolerant to soil residues of sulfonylurea herbicides, providing wheat growers in the affected areas with a new rotational cropping option.
CDC Triffid was field-tested under confined conditions in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Alberta from 1989 to 1995.
In 1993, the GM flax variety entered the pedigreed seed system when a half-acre of breeder seed was planted at the University of Saskatchewan.
Seed multiplication didn’t start in earnest until 1996 when 13 growers planted 480 acres of the crop. The following year, 64 seed growers planted 7,900 acres of the GM flax. That was the apex for CDC Triffid. Plantings fell to 1,600 acres in 1998 and 200 acres in 1999.
There were no inspections for certification beyond 1999.
Using average flax yields for those years, seed growers would have produced 198,478 bushels of seed.
When it became clear that CDC Triffid was going to be deregistered, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency visited all of the seed growers and marked the crop in their bins with confetti. An estimated 200,000 bushels of the marked crop were crushed and distributed domestically.
Officials with the Flax Council of Canada and the CFIA say none of the seed was distributed to commercial growers.
But according to Dale Adolphe, executive director of the Canadian Seed Growers Association, certified seed crop certificates were issued, which is an indication that some seed made it into the hands of regular farmers.
“I only assume that it did,” he said.
If Canadian labs confirm that the samples from Europe contain CDC Triffid, the best bet is that some seed grower or commercial farmer held onto their supplies for a number of years and then decided to grow it.
“Whoever was growing it did themselves a disadvantage as well as a disadvantage to the entire flax community,” McHughen said.
McHughen, who is now a professor at the University of California, harbours no guilt about introducing CDC Triffid to Canadian agriculture.
“At the time we developed this, we followed the laws. We followed the procedures. We did everything we were supposed to do and we were prudent in removing the registration for Triffid when it became apparent that the Europeans were not going to accept the dossier.”
