Members of the federal official opposition have lined up with organizers of over two dozen rallies scheduled across the country Tuesday to call for a halt on any move to commercialize genetically modified (GM) alfalfa in Canada.
Roundup Ready alfalfa, which has been grown only on test plots in Canada but was authorized for sale and planting in the U.S. in 2011 following a court challenge, uses seed and ag chem firm Monsanto’s patented genetics to confer glyphosate tolerance.
“It’s incomprehensible that the Harper Conservatives would allow Monsanto to genetically alter a crop that serves farmers perfectly well already,” Malcolm Allen, a southern Ontario MP and the New Democrats’ critic for agriculture, said in a release Tuesday.
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GM alfalfa could be registered for sale in Eastern Canada “as early as this month,” the NDP said.
Federal Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz’s office at North Battleford, Sask. was the site of one of Tuesday’s rallies against GM alfalfa, co-ordinated by groups including the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network (CBAN) and National Farmers Union-Ontario (NFU-O).
CBAN said rallies were to be held in 38 communities, including 17 in Ontario.
“Certainly we recognize the right of Canadians to demonstrate, should they decide, or to wave a flag in front of my office any chance that they have,” Ritz said on a conference call Tuesday from Washington, D.C.
“But at the end of the day I would hope they would make their reasoning and their rationale based on sound science, as we have done.”
Furthermore, Ritz said, while he hasn’t been in discussions with Monsanto, he has heard the company is “not in a rush to commercialize.”
Trish Jordan, spokeswoman for Monsanto Canada, was quoted in the April 11 issue of the Manitoba Co-operator as saying the company hasn’t yet decided when it might move to commercialize a GM alfalfa.
Critics are concerned that Roundup Ready traits or other GM-installed genetics, if introduced into a bee-pollinated crop such as alfalfa, “cannot be easily contained to prevent cross-contamination” of conventional and/or organic alfalfa varieties, the NDP said.
“If it’s introduced, GM alfalfa will ruin export markets for alfalfa products, contaminate family farms, make it more difficult for farmers to control weeds, and threaten the future of organic food and farming in Canada,” CBAN has said on its website.
Some weeds in Ontario are already becoming resistant to glyphosate, CBAN has said, and introducing another glyphosate-tolerant crop would serve only to increase resistance in weeds.
Besides, the group said, alfalfa “is almost always grown in a mix with grasses and establishes readily without the use of herbicides.”
“Fundraising”
Monsanto, on its U.S. parent firm’s website, has retorted that 99 per cent of alfalfa acres produce only forage, in which case farmers harvest their fields before any significant flowering occurs and the risk of pollen drift is thus “severely limited.”
Furthermore, the company has said its product stewardship policies require farmers planting Roundup Ready alfalfa to harvest the crop “at or before this point in the blooming process.”
Also, the company said, alfalfa flowers do not shed pollen to the wind and are “pollinated exclusively by only a few species of bees — which are deliberately introduced and managed by seed producers.”
“Farmers are not asking for Roundup Ready alfalfa,” NFU-O regional council member Karen Eatwell said in a release from the farmers’ group, noting any GM alfalfa variety still must pass variety registration through the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
Growers “do not need it, and they do not want it,” said Eatwell, a Middlesex County farmer.
However, CBAN’s protests on Tuesday also spurred the opposite reaction from other groups. Manitoba Beef Producers, for one, on Tuesday issued a “statement of public support for science-based research.”
“This is not just about one variety of alfalfa,” the group’s president, Trevor Atchison, said in a release. “This is about maintaining a regulatory environment that supports the research that is critical to our industry.”
Producers, he said, “must rely on Canada’s rigorous science-based process to certify the environmental and health safety of new forage varieties… Non-science issues, like foreign market access or public acceptance, should be left to the industry and market to address.”
CBAN’s opposition to GM alfalfa “is more about a special interest group trying to get attention to support their fundraising than it is about any real health concerns,” Richard Phillips, executive director of the Grain Growers of Canada, said in a separate release.
“In fact, this new alfalfa has been researched and approved by the Canadian government and has full food, feed and environmental release approval, as it has in the United States as well.”
— AGCanada.com Network staff, with files from Lisa Guenther of Grainews.
