Agricultural chemical and biotechnology companies fear they are losing the public relations battle with David Suzuki, but remain committed to swaying opinion in their favour.
“The public perception of our products is too often negative rather than positive,” says CropLife Canada president Lorne Hepworth.
Some days combating the negative press stemming from environmental activists such as Suzuki seems overwhelming.
“The public is fed a steady news diet of urban myths, junk science and downright lies when it comes to pesticides and plant biotechnology,” said Hepworth, whose organization represents the manufacturers, developers and distributors of pesticides and GM crops.
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However, he said it is necessary to keep telling the other side of the story if the industry wants public policy to be dictated by medical and environmental science rather than political science.
“We must not give up,” he told delegates attending CropLife’s annual convention in Saskatoon.
Terry Boehm, vice-president of the National Farmers Union, bristles at the notion that those expressing deep concerns over who is ultimately benefiting from such technologies are employing junk science.
“If they were really interested in winning a PR campaign they might pay a little more careful attention to these concerns and attempt to address them,” he said.
He also has difficulty with the idea that sound science should be the only arbiter of public policy.
Governments need to tread slowly when the public is not ready to accept a new technology.
In an attempt to sway public opinion, Hepworth wants to spread the message that his members are going to great lengths to eliminate health, safety and environmental risks associated with the products they sell to farmers.
In addition to what his member companies spend on their own environmental programs, they contribute to the annual budget of CropLife, 60 percent of which is devoted to stewardship initiatives.
“It is our single biggest budget item,” Hepworth said.
The money pays for programs such as CleanFarms, one of the most successful voluntary recycling programs in the world. Last crop year the program achieved a national pesticide container return rate of 73 percent.
The association has also collected and safely disposed of more than one million kilograms of obsolete pesticides since 1998.
On the biotechnology front, the association has been running a compliance management course for confined field trials since 2000 and has set up procedures to help companies discontinue unwanted products from the marketplace.
In addition to minimizing the environmental impact of its products, the industry is offering solutions to environmental quagmires.
Hepworth said the combination of modern tillage equipment and herbicide tolerant cropping systems is protecting soil from wind and water erosion.
Developments in biotechnology and genomics offer a solution to water management problems and the looming food crisis by creating crops that are heat, drought and salt tolerant.
He hopes some of those advancements will help convince the public that the products his member companies produce are not the environmental menace they’ve been made out to be.
Hepworth noted that his companies haven’t “gone green” because that’s the in-thing to do. Many of the initiatives were undertaken nearly 20 years ago.
“Putting stewardship first is not just part of jumping on the bandwagon,” he said.
“It’s part of the industry ethic.”
Boehm said programs such as the container recycling initiative are a response to the so-called “junk science” put forth by the environmental movement.
As well, he balks at what he calls CropLife’s co-opting of the word “stewardship” to further its real objective.
“They are not particularly concerned about environmental and other consequences. They are really concerned about getting these (products) out there and maximizing profits.”
