The Flax Council of Canada is stamping out a fire before it gets started.
An article that ran in CropLife Canada’s Biocrop News publication could leave farmers with the mistaken impression the industry is ready to embrace biotech crops, said council president Barry Hall.
It quotes Flax Canada 2015 co-ordinator Kelly Fitzpatrick as saying that part of the strategy to increase flax acreage to five million acres in 2015 from its current 1.5 million could include planting biotech varieties.
Hall said the story is misleading and it takes Fitzpatrick’s comments further than she intended.
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“It may have come out that 2015 was promoting transgenic research at this time, and they’re not.”
What the 2015 committee is promoting is a better understanding of flax genomics.
But the knowledge gained through genetic research will be used to support conventional breeding programs, not the development of transgenic varieties, said Hall.
Denise Dewar, executive director of plant biotechnology at CropLife Canada, an association representing the plant science industry, said it is unfortunate if Fitzpatrick’s comments were misleading or misconstrued.
“It certainly wasn’t intended to be that way at all.”
Dewar said the main message of the article should have been that the flax sector is embracing genomics research as a way to speed up varietal development and that there is future potential for biotech crops like omega 3 enriched flax, which could be fed to farmed salmon.
“We’re hopeful that the technology will be used in flax down the road when the markets do open up,” said Dewar.
Hall shares that optimism but said for the time being farmers are reluctant to embrace biotech flax.
In the mid-1990s the flax industry nearly commercialized a herbicide-tolerant variety called Triffid, which was created through genetic modification.
But when the industry saw how Europe responded to the release of GM canola, it moved quickly to terminate the Triffid project.
Canola was shut out of the European Union, which was and remains the key market for flax. Belgium consumed 82 percent of last year’s flax exports.
“It would have destroyed the industry. That’s why it was shut down,” said Hall.
Ten years later the EU is no closer to accepting biotech flax and the Canadian industry is still unwilling to go down the biotech road.
“At some point I would hope that we could get beyond this (market acceptance issue) and utilize this technology in a positive way. But at this point the benefit doesn’t seem to be there,” he said.
