Another 'grass roots' campaign gets feisty about GM

Could 'farmer power' force Australian state governments to back down on their moratoria on GM crops? Graeme O'Neill reports.

Farmers in Western Australia's major canola-growing region around Esperance have voted overwhelmingly to ask the state government to lift its moratorium on genetically modified crops to allow them to grow herbicide-tolerant GM canolas.

Northam-based agricultural consultant Bill Crabtree says WA agriculture minister Kim Chance -- who has publicly declared he would not eat GM food -- told him he would consider the farmers' request to relax the moratorium to allow farmers in the Esperance region to grow higher yielding GM canola cultivars.

Crabtree, leader of a campaign against the WA moratorium, recently estimated that it is costing WA farmers AUD$170 million a year in higher costs and foregone profits. His estimate lends weight to a recent analysis by Dr Stephen Apted, of the Australian Bureau of Agricultural Resource Economics (ABARE), which projected losses of $3 billion to the Australian economy over the next decade if the GM-shy states and territories continue their GM crop bans.

The figure of $3 billion was the mean of multiple runs of the ABARE model, employing slightly different assumptions to test the model's sensitivity. The range of potential losses was $1.8 billion to $6 billion over the next decade (see 'No GM? Your loss', below).

But anti-GM activists Jeremy Tager, of Greenpeace Australia, and Jo Immig, of the NSW Nature Conservation Council, have questioned the assumptions of the ABARE modelling exercise, and the data on which Crabtree based his estimate of $170 million in losses in WA alone. "We haven't seen the modelling that underpins that [ABARE] report," Tager said. "It hasn't been released, but some assumptions are so ludicrous that it has far less to do with economic modelling than with promoting the release of GM canola.

"On the issue of GM wheat, it is not only supposing the wheat will be released, but that it will result in increased yields. GM wheat is dead in the water, and that kind of assumption calls into question the credibility of ABARE's modelling.

"They have admitted they have not factored in the cost of segregation and co-existence -- the EU is currently grappling with questions of co-existence. And who is liable in the event that things go wrong? Clearly, the current generation of crops has no consumer appeal. It's the reason markets are resisting them."

Immig is a member of on the NSW Agricultural Advisory Council on Gene Technology, which advises the NSW agriculture minister on GM crops. She questioned Crabtree's study, saying it had relied on dubious yield claims supplied by Bayer and Monsanto on limited-scale field trials of GM canola varieties in 2003, when there was little evidence to support claims of significantly higher yields for such varieties under field conditions.

Immig said Japanese buyers had expressed concern at the recent episode involving contamination of an Australian canola shipment by traces of GM canola. Asked why Japanese buyers would be concerned about such low levels of contamination, when the maximum allowable level was 5 per cent, she said, "There is definitely a strong market for non-GE canola in Japan. They import non-GM canola for Australia for specific purposes, and if they're paying a premium for the product, they expect it to be 100 per cent GM-free.

"Because we have moratoriums in place that specify zero tolerance, we expect to maintain zero tolerance. It has nothing to do with health or safety issues, it sets down a legal position," she said.

The ABARE study, and previous studies of the global market for GM canola, have found that there is no premium for GM-free canola in any of Australia's overseas markets.

Who to believe?

According to Crabtree, farmers in WA are "desperate for independent, objective and believable" information about GM canola and other GM crops.

Surveys of 224 farmers who attended the three meetings in Esperance had initially found that 55 per cent were undecided on the GM canola issue, 5 per cent were opposed, and 40 per cent were in favour. But by the end of the third meeting, opinion had swung strongly in favour of GM canola, with 95 per cent in favour, only 5 per cent undecided, and no opposition.

Crabtree said a series of three meetings had been held in Esperance at which AusBiotech's agricultural biotechnology advisory group chairman, Dr Ian Edwards, and other experts on GM crops, had discussed the benefits of growing GM canola.

Crabtree said farmers were growing increasingly angry at the moratorium's effects on their livelihoods, and at the strong influence that anti-GM groups seem to be wielding over Chance's public pronouncements and the government's agricultural policies.

In May, Chance declared that he would not eat GM food unless he was dying of starvation. He said his prime concern was the possibility that a promoter element used to obtain high expression levels of the transgenes that confer herbicide tolerance in GM canola would switch on 'junk DNA' in humans, such as dormant genes for forming a tail.

Edwards claimed Chance was seeking -- and promoting -- the views of prominent supporters of the moratorium, like Julie Newman, of the Network of Concerned Farmers (NCF), Greenpeace Australia-Pacific, and Dr Judy Carman, the South Australian GP who founded the Independent Science Panel, an anti-GM NGO.

"The minister is quite intransigent in his position," Edwards told Australian Biotechnology News. "Some of his remarks have a reasonable measure of balance to them, but they are counteracted by his statements after traces of GM canola were found in Australian canola shipments."

Edwards said the anti-GM movement had drawn "totally erroneous conclusions" from the contamination episode, and described its response as a "total overreaction" relative to any possible health or economic risk involved.

He pointed out that the contamination was very low level -- 0.01 per cent, or 500 times lower than the 5 per cent maximum specified by Japan for adventitious contamination, and well below the more stringent 0.9 per cent maximum by the European Union.

Edwards said an episode during the WA election campaign last May provided the "smoking gun" evidence that the minister had become an intellectual captive of the anti-GM movement.

"AusBiotech wrote to the minister, requesting a meeting to discuss the moratorium and its impacts, but he turned us down, saying it would be improper because the government was in caretaker mode during the election campaign. Yet the minister, on the same day, sent a very detailed letter on the government's position on the moratorium to Julie Newman of NCF, who posted it on the NCF website.

"The bottom line is that the minister is out of phase with his own department, and out of phase with farmer organisations. We have to ask who the minister is listening to -- where does he get his advice?"

Edwards said it was now "pretty clear" where advocates of GM technology stood. Scientists and agricultural experts were limited in their ability to influence politicians -- the impetus had to come from farmers themselves, and they should be "as mad as hell" about the moratorium's effects on their ability to make a living.

Crabtree said Esperance farmers want to grow GM canola cultivars because yields are significantly higher than the non-GM, triazine-tolerant varieties that currently dominate WA production. On the basis of Canada's experience, they are also likely to be more profitable, and provide better weed control, especially of ryegrass that has become resistant to other herbicides.

He said that, even before the recent education campaign, 90 per cent of farmers in the Esperance region had supported the introduction of a salt-tolerant GM wheat cultivar developed by Perth-based wheat breeding company Grain Biotech Australia, which is being field trialled near Corrigin.

GM-free? Your loss

Dr Stephen Apted's report on a modelling exercise by the Australian Bureau of Agricultural Resource Economics found that the Australian agriculture stands to lose $3 billion -- and as much as $6 billion -- over the next decade if it does not introduce GM crops.

Apted said the report looked at the impacts on a range of crops -- wheat, barley and canola. For canola alone, the economic loss could be $3 billion.

"The internal workings of the model were that we attributed a productivity gain to GM crops, based on published data from around the world," Apted said. "We modelled two scenarios: one in which Australia and the rest of the world continue to adopt GM crops according to current trends, and the other where the rest of world continues to adopt, but Australia doesn't.

"Under the second scenario, the loss in gross national product is $3 billion.

"We didn't model environmental factors or consumer-acceptance scenarios. A range of other issues could have been taken into account, but we kept it very simple.

"GM canola can't be exported to the European Union, but the EU is a relatively small, opportunistic market, and my research makes it fairly clear there is a softening of the regulatory stance in the EU. Spain already grows GM maize, and there is an increase in the area of GM maize being grown in the EU. So we concentrated on larger scale markets like Japan and China, which don't differentiate between GM and non-GM canola.

"The main thrust of the study was that it's not just about what happens in Australia, but what happens in the rest of the world."

Apted said he believed GM crops were here to stay. "They're already well established in North America, South Africa and Argentina, and they're being adopted at a significantly rapid rate by other nations," he said. "Brazil is showing signs of adopting GM crops, and there is substantial uptake in the Philippines. China already grows GM cotton, is poised to commercialise GM rice, and it already accepts GM soy and canola seed. These countries are all potential competitors for Australia."

Apted said China's R&D investment in GM crops was now second only to that of the US. "It's a pretty fair pointer to where China is likely to go in future," he said. "It's a big market for things like oilseeds, wheat and barley, and there are changes evident in China in terms of how its own agricultural markets will develop.

"If we align that with the fact that it is highly likely that China will adopt GM food grains, the logical endpoint is that GM wheat and barley will become acceptable in the not too distant future. There are dietary changes occurring towards higher-quality wheat products, so the market for Australian grain in China is likely to improve, and we are also likely to see growth in China's intensive livestock industries, so their demand for feed barley is also likely to increase."

Apted said that as competition became fiercer, Australia needed to remain competitive in China, and in other large Asian markets. That competitiveness was potentially reduced by the continuing moratoria on GM crops. There was no premium for non-GM canola in Australia's two largest export markets -- Japan and China -- and with Australian agricultural producers facing declining terms of trade, GM crops were one way to boost farm productivity.

He said Australia had the R&D capacity to develop "boutique" varieties of grains like wheat and barley for specialised markets, but if the path to market for technical innovation remained unclear, investment in agbiotech R&D would inevitably decline, and Australia's capacity to profit from innovation would be compromised.