GM crops: Australia waits for the world

M-Day is approaching for Victoria: will the Bracks government end its 12-month, voluntary moratorium on commercial cropping of genetically modified canola, imposed in May last year?

When Victoria opted not to follow other states into a legislated, multi-year moratorium on GM herbicide-tolerant canolas, it prevented an effective Australia-wide lockout of all new GM crops.

The government's attempt to assuage consumer angst about GM crops, without doing lasting damage to the state's biotechnology industry, made Victoria a lightning rod for a storm of anti-GM propaganda. The anti-GM movement knows it would only take one season of limited-scale commercial trials to break the spell of suspicion that it has cast over Australian farmers and consumers.

Any large-scale Victorian trial would become a must-see attraction for canola farmers from the moratorium states of NSW, Western Australia, and South Australia -- most of them already familiar with the advantages of growing conventional HT canolas.

For all the anti-GM movement's best efforts to convince farmers to the contrary, GMHT canolas are compellingly ordinary in the photosynthetic flesh, but visibly taller and more robust than the stunted, low-yielding triazine-tolerant (TT) canola varieties that currently dominate the industry.

Farmers would see profits, not Triffids. Their clamour to grow the new canolas would soon convince the other states to lift their moratoriums.

The Victorian government imposed its voluntary moratorium just in time to prevent Bayer CropScience from planting farm-scale trials in the 2003 season. The federal GM watchdog, the Office of the Gene Regulator, had just given Bayer permission to release its GMHT canolas for commercial use. Monsanto Australia has now also received OGTR approval to release its glyphosate-tolerant Roundup Ready GM canolas.

Both companies submitted reluctantly to the voluntary moratorium. After all, Canada has been growing the same types of GMHT canolas safely since 1996, and has had no problems selling its entire crop, despite the loss of its former markets in Europe -- which were not large, as Europe is a net exporter of canola.

NZ loosens up

The international GM crop scene has changed markedly since Victoria imposed its moratorium. In New Zealand, where anti-GM sentiment is stronger than in Australia, the Clark government has lifted its moratorium on field trials of GM organisms, and freed up legislation that had hogtied research and development.

The NZ moratorium was imposed during a royal commission into genetically modified organisms, which did much to expose the anti-GM movement's arguments as scientifically untenable, even downright silly. GM researchers and the biotechnology industry followed the proceedings of the royal commission intently, in a forlorn expectation that it might put the international anti-GM movement to flight.

The commission found that New Zealand could not afford to ignore the potential benefits of the technology, that it was not inherently dangerous and that R&D should proceed with caution. Inevitably, New Zealand's anti-GM movement simply rejected its findings, and redoubled its efforts to keep New Zealand agriculture 'clean and green'.

Meanwhile, New Zealand's moratorium is off, and the Environmental Risk Management Authority (ERMA) has recently approved the first, limited field trial of a GM crop: herbicide tolerant onions.

US-born GM crops expert Dr Rick Roush, former director of the Cooperative Research Centre for Weed Management, who returned to the US last year, says one of the things he most admired about Australia was that it was a very secular, rational nation, not usually swept by quasi-religious views. "One of the saddest things is that even a very sensible country like Australia can be led down a prickly garden path by a few activists, abetted by a gullible or even self-serving media," he said.

Europe thawing

Even in rabidly anti-GM Europe and Britain, there are unmistakable signs of a thaw in political sentiment. Politicians have finally run out of scientifically plausible concerns that might justify a continuing ban on all GM crops, and rejection of imported GM produce.

The German chancellor, Gerhard Schroder, recently insisted that his agriculture minister, Renate Kunast -- a member of the Greens party, and a resolute opponent of GM crops -- announce that Germany will proceed with trials of GM crops this year.

Soon after, the European Union's executive commission announced it would support a proposal to allow imports of at least one type of pest-resistant GM maize -- the Bt-11 variety developed by Swiss agrochemical giant Syngenta. The EU has since rejected the proposal, despite a 9-5 vote in favour by member nations. The vote was lost 62-53 in a voting system that weights each nation's vote by population. Oddly, Germany abstained, but the vote confirmed that political resistance to GM crops is ebbing in the anti-GM movement's heartland.

If EU agriculture ministers cannot agree to approve GM crops, the executive commission has the power to rubber-stamp its own proposal.

Warnings dated

GM soybeans are used in a wide range of processed foods, and in animal feed. In the US, the world's largest soy producer, GMHT varieties account for 80 per cent of production.

Europe has banned US soy, and relies on the world's second largest producer, Brazil, for non-GM imports. But for nearly half a decade, many Brazilian growers have been illegally growing Roundup Ready varieties smuggled over the border from Argentina. Because the crops are illegal, there is no segregation of GM and conventional soy for export. European importers and consumers knowingly accept Brazilian soy as 'clean and green', knowing it probably contains GM seeds.

This see-no-evil tale has a parallel in Australia. It suits the purpose of Greenpeace and the Australian GeneEthics Network to use the thin-end-of-the-wedge argument that GM canola would be Australia's first homegrown GM food crop. It's not -- Australians have been eating margarine and cooking oil extracted from the seeds of home-grown, pesticide-resistant GM cotton for more than half a decade.

The same organisations have also singled out Australia's biggest chicken producer, for feeding its birds imported GM maize protected by the Bt pesticide gene. But they neglect to point out that Australian feedlot beef producers feed cattle the high-protein GM cottonseed meal left over after the oil is extracted.

Feedlot companies actually prefer the GM cottonseed, because it is free of the pesticide endosulfan, whose residues caused importers to reject shipments of Australian beef in the early 1990s.

The anti-GM movement's dire warnings about potential long-term health effects of GM foods have exceeded their expiry date -- the world has been eating processed foods containing GM ingredients since 1996, with not a single confirmed case of toxicity, allergenicity or any acute or long-term health effect.

To its credit, the Victorian government was at pains to point out when it imposed its moratorium last May that it accepts the OGTR's conclusion that GM canola poses no greater risk to human health or the environment than conventional canola.

The moratorium was imposed only to provide time for an analysis of the potential impact of commercial GM canola production on Australia's overseas trade, and the grain industry's capacity to keep GM and non-GM canola segregated through the supply chain.

Last November, the government asked eminent Melbourne University economist Professor Peter Lloyd to conduct the review. It is now awaiting his report.

Triazine ban

Strangely, no government -- state or federal -- is investigating the health or environmental impacts of the conventionally triazine-tolerant canola varieties that currently dominate the Australian industry.

What nobody in government seems prepared to say is that there there is good scientific evidence that GMHT canolas would actually be less damaging, even beneficial, to the environment. But like the wise monkeys of fable, the politicians who authored the state moratoriums have their hands firmly over their eyes and ears.

Since the Victorian moratorium began, the European Union has banned triaizine herbicides (atrazine and simazine) as a threat to the environment, and possibly to human health. Triazines are highly soluble and persistent. Because they do not degrade rapidly, or bind to the soil, they can contaminate waterways and groundwater tables.

Triazine use in Australia is highest in WA, whose farmers grow triazine-tolerant canolas almost exclusively, and also use the herbicides to control sandplain lupin crops. WA's highly permeable, sandy soils, make the state's groundwaters particularly susceptible to contamination. However, the hazard to human health is probably minimal, because in rural areas, the state's groundwaters tend to be too saline for human consumption.

The anti-GM movement has been urging Australian farmers to reject GMHT canolas, on the grounds that Europe is a potentially lucrative market for Australia's non-GM canola. But Europe is a net exporter of canola: it is only an itinerant customer for the Australian product, and accounts for only 13 per cent of Australia's export sales. Most of Australia's canola is sold to Japan, China and Pakistan, which do not discriminate against GM canola.

It will be interesting to see if the Victorian Reynolds report considers the market-access implications of the European ban on triazine herbicides.

The logical extension of the ban is that Europe will also refuse to import canola grown with triazine herbicides, even it contains undetectable or acceptable levels of triazine residues.

Because of their own domestic ban on GM crops, EU nations refuse to fund research and development of GM crops in Africa because of potential environmental and health hazards to Africans.

If Japan were to follow the European ban on triazine herbicides, Australia would lose its most lucrative market -- a market that readily accepts GM canola from Canada.

Because the Reynolds inquiry has taken health and environment issues out of the equation, the anti-GM movement has been hammering the issue of GM contamination and market access for GM canola.