Even as they were publicly insisting that Canada’s regulatory system makes release of genetically modified plant varieties environmentally and agronomically safe, Canadian regulators privately spent much of 2002 trying to figure out how to control growing evidence of problems.
Early last year, the Plant Biosafety Office of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency organized an unpublicized by-invitation-only workshop to discuss growing evidence of volunteer herbicide-resistant canola on prairie farms. There are worries that increasing the number of improved varieties of GM canola or wheat will create more problems.
The workshop, featuring two skeptical University of Manitoba plant researchers and two Manitoba farmers who had experienced problems, was organized “anticipating that authorization of additional herbicide-tolerant canola or other crops may have a potential for negative agronomic or environmental impacts,” said a report on the February 2002 meeting prepared by the inspection agency’s executive vice-president André Gravel.
Read Also
Stock dogs show off herding skills at Ag in Motion
Stock dogs draw a crowd at Ag in Motion. Border collies and other herding breeds are well known for the work they do on the farm.
He wrote that as a result of the meeting more research was being funded to try to figure out how to minimize or contain potential damage.
Although there was no “concrete evidence” of significant agronomic or environmental concerns so far, “the PBO is taking seriously the concerns that both currently approved herbicide-tolerant canola and/or future authorizations of herbicide-tolerant canola or other crops may exacerbate these concerns.”
Earlier, in a background report before the meeting, the agency’s vice-president Peter Brackenridge had contradicted Gravel’s assertion of no evidence. “There is some evidence that herbicide-tolerant volunteer canola may indeed pose some agronomic challenges,” he wrote to then-president Ron Doering.
A report on the meeting prepared by Gravel was obtained by Access to Information researcher Ken Rubin of Ottawa. The report did not reveal the names of meeting participants.
However, it did report some significant farm level dissatisfaction with the invasive potential of GM varieties, the additional farm management it requires and the performance of corporate Monsanto, developer of the popular Roundup Ready canola.
“Farmers having difficulty controlling volunteers of herbicide-tolerant canola may incur additional expenses for additional herbicide applications, or may lose income due to decreased quality of their harvest,” said the report. “Affected farmers are concerned that their issues are not being heard or considered.”
And as for corporate promises of customer satisfaction, “Monsanto has widely advertised to the farming community that it will resolve these sorts of problems, upon request, at its expense. However, the guests from Manitoba provided evidence that this service is not always adequate.”
In public, the CFIA, Agriculture Canada and the Pest Management Regulatory Agency insisted through the year that the use of herbicide-tolerant varieties was tightly controlled and that critics were exaggerating.
At the workshop, participants were told that “volunteers of currently approved herbicide-tolerant canola may appear unwanted in some fields, particularly when sprayed with the herbicide in question, either through inadvertent pollen flow or seed dispersal or through impurities in the starting seed itself.”
And the volunteer plants may not always be controlled through use of other more traditional herbicides “as is frequently suggested.”
The workshop heard that minimum till farmers often are forced to till to control volunteers.
Part of the reason for the federally organized workshop was reaction to nationally televised complaints from University of Manitoba researcher Martin Entz that volunteer GM canola is becoming “a significant agronomic problem in Western Canada.”
A senior federal official responded that it is merely “an agronomic nuisance” that could be controlled.
Reaction to that dismissal of the issue as minor led to complaints that prompted senior federal officials to concede a problem exists and to plan ongoing research to determine how extensive and serious it is.
There also was federal concern over a statement by English Nature, a United Kingdom biodiversity government agency, that said in Canada, volunteer GM canola samples “are on the road to becoming nuisance weeds” and require farmers to revert to older, less environmentally safe herbicides.
