VANCOUVER – Cue the theme to Jaws.
Like the movie monster shark, the genetically modified issue has surfaced again – this time in an unlikely place, a pulse crop trade conference.
GM crops haven’t made their way into this industry, but GM material from other crops has.
The manager of the largest private milling company in France said Canada risks losing the European feed pea market if it doesn’t severely reduce the foreign material that comes along for the ride with pea shipments.
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Mees Van Dongen said Canada’s eight percent maximum dockage allowance allows foreign material from genetically modified canola crops to make its way into boatloads of peas and that is a disturbing prospect for many European buyers.
He said product off the combine has only one or two percent dockage in it, but that is topped up to 7.95 percent at the export terminals. The maximum allowable amount of foreign material is eight percent.
“They need to get rid of the screenings from canola and wheat and they just add it into peas,” said Van Dongen, who manages Soufflet Negoce, a French milling company.
“You open your ship when it comes to Europe and you see only rubbish.”
Rob Tisdale, manager of special crops for Xcan Grain Pool Ltd., admits it is a common practice.
“The only way to solve it is to ship clean peas – drop the foreign material.”
Tisdale said Canadian exporters are willing to ship feed peas in any form the end user wants, but customers must be willing to pay more for clean product. The Europeans haven’t been ponying up the cash.
“Ultimately if the buyers press hard enough, we’ll ship whatever they want and the pricing will work out in the country.”
Western Europe buys more Canadian peas than any other region. Sales topped 589,000 tonnes for the first eight months of the 2000-01 crop year. Spain accounts for more than half of that total.
“The Spanish people are still buying this eight percent because they are just money buyers. They want the cheapest material possible. But northern countries don’t buy it any more.”
Statistics Canada export data shows sales to the Netherlands and the United Kingdom have dropped dramatically. Sales to those two countries for the first eight months of the 2000-01 crop year are 2,423 tonnes, down from the five-year average of 41,598 tonnes.
Van Dongen said that’s because Europeans are worried about possible GM contamination.
Tisdale has a different explanation for why northern Europe isn’t a big buyer of Canadian peas. Livestock producers in Europe use peas as a source of energy rather than protein, and peas are too costly to use for that purpose.
He said Spain is still buying peas because it is a large hog producing nation and transportation logistics make it cheaper to buy product from Canada rather than trucking it over the Pyrenees from France.
