Flax growers received the distressing news that they had lost their largest market weeks before they headed into the fields to harvest what would turn out to be a bountiful crop.
In July 2009, a commercial laboratory in Europe detected a low level presence of genetically modified material in a shipment of Canadian flax. The Canadian Grain Commission confirmed the finding Sept. 2.
One week later, the European Commission issued a rapid alert notification indicating that the contamination was from CDC Triffid, a herbicide tolerant line of GM flax developed in the late 1980s by University of Saskatchewan Crop Development Centre breeder Alan McHughen.
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Food products containing Canadian flax have since been pulled off store shelves in dozens of European countries, bringing an end to trade with a $317 million market that accounted for 80 percent of Canada’s bulk flax exports in 2008-09.
Grower prices delivered to a plant in Saskatchewan fell to $6.80 per bushel by late September, down from a high of $12.50 in June. Some of that lost ground has since been recovered.
Triffid received temporary regulatory approval from authorities in Canada and the United States in the late 1990s. In 2001, McHughen voluntarily deregistered the variety due to flax industry fears it would destroy markets for the crop in Europe, where consumers were expressing concerns about GM technology.
The herbicide tolerant variety entered Canada’s pedigreed seed system in 1996, with plantings peaking in 1997 when 64 seed producers grew 7,900 acres of Triffid. Once the flax industry rejected the crop, an estimated 200,000 bushels of pedigreed seed were crushed and distributed domestically. Officials believed nothing made it into the hands of regular growers.
But somehow the variety entered the commercial stream. The Canadian Grain Commission announced on Dec. 18 the results of an investigation confirming Triffid contamination was prevalent at low levels throughout the entire grain handling system and on farms scattered across the three prairie provinces.
The only way Canadian flax can move to Europe is through a stringent testing protocol signed by the two trading partners ensuring future shipments contain a maximum of .01 percent Triffid contamination, which grain companies have found to be onerous.
Heading into 2010, trade with Europe was still in limbo.
