Canadian grain and oilseed exporters face trade barriers and challenges around the world because governments, including Canada’s, have not moved quickly to dilute regulations against the presence of small amounts of unauthorized impurities in food.
The problem, said Bill Leask of the Canadian Seed Trade Association, is that consumers take at face value claims that seed shipments are free of genetically modified seeds or that organically certified produce is 100 percent free of chemically aided products.
“It is impossible to guarantee that,” Leask said in a Nov. 14 interview. “In a system of bulk commodity and unrestricted production of some GMO varieties, it is impossible. You’ve got a lot of consumers who imagine decaffeinated coffee is just that or ‘GM-free’ is a guarantee. It is not.”
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Trace elements that are within acceptable health risks may be part of most shipments, he said.
But many governments do not have regulations that acknowledge the fact. The result is that countries without rules explicitly approving trace levels of unapproved substances effectively have zero tolerance.
That could lead to import and export challenges, Leask has warned the federal government.
“There is an urgent need to develop a trace level safety assessment policy, plus a review and approval process for unintended trace levels in seed, grain, food and feed,” according to a position paper on GMOs submitted to the federal government in December 2002 by the seed trade association.
“Without a policy and trace level safety assessment process, the standard or threshold for biotechnology-derived products has become zero or zero detection,” the association said in its brief to government, obtained by Ottawa access-to-information researcher Ken Rubin. “This lack of policy and assessment process has negatively impacted seed, grain and food trade.”
Anti-GMO critics argue the proposals are an industry attempt to weaken consumer protection rather than force industry to be more responsible about how it advertises what it sells.
Within government, the warning has some high level supporters, although there is no resolution yet.
“Ultimately, Canada and our commodity trading partners would benefit from systems that avoid any preventable regulatory actions or trade disruptions by, for example, developing some means of evaluating adventitious intermittent low level presence of unapproved transgenic material,” Canadian Food Inspection Agency president Richard Fadden said in an April 2003 memo to agriculture minister Lyle Vanclief.
“If and when found to be safe, this material could receive ‘approval’ status at trace levels.”
Earlier in the memo unearthed by Rubin, Fadden had warned there is no way Canada or any country with GM varieties in the national crop mix can guarantee GM-free shipments.
“Given the scale of bilateral trade, there is a high probability that, at intermittent low levels, there are unapproved transgenic seed and grain in export-import shipments from respective countries,” Fadden wrote.
He said the answer is for Canada and other countries to create rules that recognize there is no such thing as a guarantee of zero impurities.
