Canadian agriculture should abandon its “trade or bust” mentality and begin to listen more closely to what potential markets are saying they want, an environmental activist told members of Parliament last week.
Christine Elwell, senior policy analyst with the Sierra Club of Canada, was appearing before a House of Commons committee studying Canadian relations with Europe.
She contradicted farm witnesses who had earlier told the committee the European Union is unduly protectionist.
Instead, she said Europeans know what they want to buy and Canada’s problem is that it will not accept that decision.
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“We’d have better access to Europe if we came to a better understanding of the value we put on commodities and how they are produced,” said Elwell, as members of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture delegation looked on tight-lipped.
The Sierra Club activist said Canada should quit using trade rules to try to force Europeans to accept hormone-produced beef or genetically modified seed and food.
“It would be prudent as farmers, governments and market players to take those concerns seriously.”
And Canadian farmers should not become dependent on genetically modified plant varieties, she warned, because European skepticism is spreading elsewhere.
“Markets are turning.”
Elwell was one of the demonstrators at world trade talks in Seattle, Washington.
She told MPs she was happy the talks collapsed because it derailed an attempt to create rules for trade in genetically modified products.
When Liberal MP and chicken producer Murray Calder told her the important thing was to get politics out of the debate over genetically modified food and base the debate on science, she said the science-based argument is a myth.
Politics always will be part of the debate because scientific opinion is divided, she said, which means it becomes a political decision about what weight to give to which side.
“To divorce politics from the decision-making process is not to see the world as it really is.”
