GM Debate Hijacked by Bias
– Bill Crabtree (Agricultural Scientist and Morawa Farmer), Countryman (Western Australia), February 3, 2010
I would like to challenge several assertions that former agriculture minister Kim Chance made on genetically modified crops in the media recently. Those who know nothing of the science of genes could be alarmed by Mr Chance’s comments. Mr Chance says consumers do not want, and will not consume GM foods. GM canola oil is not protein. So, GM canola oil has no modified genes in it. For the past 15 years most of us have been eating fish and chips cooked in Australian cottonseed oil produced from GM cotton. Most pork and poultry and some beef and sheep meats grown in WA, and eaten by our families are from animals fed GM soy meal imported from America.
Mr Chance says there is no evidence of the benefits to consumers of GM foods. GM crops are cheaper to grow, and the resulting lower prices do benefit consumers. In addition, the average city person does not fully appreciate that GM is the most environmentally friendly way of producing food. GM crops and no-tillage have taken modern agriculture a long way toward a sustainable future. GM crops can be grown with less herbicide, more stubble, or mulch retention, less insecticide, less fuel, less carbon emissions, less soil erosion and can convert scarce water supplies into food. If consumers are concerned about the environment and the cost of food they have no logical choice but to applaud the benefits of GM technology. The use of GM cotton has seen a dramatic reduction in pesticide use and GM canola will remove our over reliance on the globally banned herbicide atrazine.
Mr Chance says 90 per cent of the 400 submissions to the GM Crops Free Act review were against GM. What he failed to point out is many of these letters were pro forma and most did not address the issues raised in the State Government review and were therefore correctly ignored.
WAFarmers and the Pastoralists and Graziers Association, representing the State’s farming community, submitted one application each asking the ban to be lifted. Mr Chance argues WA is one of the last dependable sources of non-GM canola, so we should stay that way. Two years of GM canola cultivation in the eastern states show segregation is possible. WA’s trials also confirmed this. Mr Chance says there is strong demand from the market for GM-free. The Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics shows consistently that there is no market premium for non-GM canola.
The primary reason for last year’s trials was to test segregation, which proved successful. But the trials showed a 15 per cent, or 200 kg/ha yield increase with GM canola over non-GM triazine-tolerant canola. With canola currently achieving $400 per tonne this is $80 per hectare more, and for some farmers this may be all the profit there is in some years.
Mr Chance says the European Union will not allow GM foods. The EU has been importing Canadian canola oil derived from GM canola through the United Arab Emirates and China for about five years and has been consuming it safely. GM corn is grown in some EU countries, and the EU imports GM corn and GM soybeans.
Mr Chance warns GM companies are pushing their own agenda and are not allowing testing of their products. GM companies do allow testing of their products. There are hundreds of papers in the scientific community carried out by highly regarded authors worldwide looking at everything from agronomic performance to fitness for consumption.
I am not against GM technology, Mr Chance says. But the former politician’s track record of press releases, door stop interviews, news conferences show he is ideologically opposed to GM. Indeed the laws he introduced in 2003 imposed a fine of $200,000 on any WA farmer using the technology.
Indee, Mr Chance repeatedly refused to travel to Canada to see the technology for himself. Except on the radical fringe, Canadian growers and consumers have no negative issues with GM canola and recognise it as an outstanding success story. In the early 1990s Australia grew about 1.7 million tonnes of canola while Canada grew about 2.5 million tonnes. Since the advent of Canadian GM canola in 1996, when I lived there, canola production has quadrupled to over 10 million tonnes and Australia has not even maintained its status quo.
Canadian farmers are not foolish and they have made the choice to grow 90 per cent of their canola as GM while still growing 10 per cent as non-GM. In conjunction with no-till, GM technology, once it becomes legal, will enable us to produce food in dryland agriculture in the most sustainable way currently known to man.
Given the impossible corner Chance has painted himself into, it is understandable that he’d be reluctant to admit his monumental misjudgment for fear of exposing himself as an emperor with no clothes. But by maintaining the pretence that there is something to fear from GM crops, he will make himself look even sillier and more intellectually disreputable than he already is.
