Stop thinking, for a moment, about whether AIDA will help.
Set aside, temporarily, unease about 1999 income prospects.
Suspend, for now, speculation about the next round of trade talks.
Listen, instead, to the growing clamor of an emerging issue that poses far greater long-term challenges for the sector than this year’s price outlook.
It is the growing public worry about food safety and the active public skepticism about science, food standards and the growing power of corporations in the food system.
This week, the evidence of its growing power as a political issue is on display. Canada’s food safety and inspection standards are under challenge. Farmers’ use of growth hormones, drugs and chemicals is dissected for danger. Agriculture’s increasing dependence on the products of genetic engineering is under attack.
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On Parliament Hill Monday, dissident Health Canada scientists and a coalition of environmentalist and social activist consumer groups spent close to four hours with sympathetic senators, warning about the dangers of mixing biotechnology and corporate-friendly government regulators.
Public policy is “ill-equipped” to regulate or to understand the implications of biotechnology or genetically modified organisms, Angela Rickman of the Sierra Club of Canada told the Senate agriculture committee. “It is clear the early voices of caution are discounted.”
Perhaps, but they certainly are gaining ground.
Turn on CBC radio. For weeks, environmental campaigner David Suzuki has been given air time for a series on the dangers of man mucking with nature, including genetic engineering in food.
CBC Radio news this week has an extensive series of stories on the theme “Field of Genes”, casting doubt on the safety of GMOs and arguing that consumers are being kept in the dark.
At the end of this week in Ottawa, the Professional Institute of the Public Service holds a public forum on the Canadian food industry, centred on food safety.
Meanwhile, the Senate committee has become a forum for unsettling testimony about turmoil within Health Canada’s food and drug regulatory bureaucracy. Activist groups also have made it clear the food industry will be a prime target of their anti-globalization, anti-corporate campaign.
All this publicity means the issue of food safety, regulation and what some call “frankenfood” increasingly will infiltrate public consciousness and political debate.
This is a good thing in a democracy. Blind faith in anything, whether science or the promises of governments or corporations, is unwise.
But it is far from clear that Canada’s farmers and food industry are prepared for the debate.
More often than not, their response is “trust us” and their defence is to try to win public sympathy for the image of the farmer.
In an era when he may be under contract to grow Monsanto GMO seed or be improving profits through use of growth-stimulating hormones, that likely won’t be good enough.
