Anti-GM movement knew of 'secret' trials

Claims by anti-GM activists that the Victorian government and Bayer CropScience are putting farmers' livelihoods at risk, by keeping secret the locations of genetically modified canola trials, have been scotched with the revelation that they have known the location of at least one participating farm for more than a year.

The Network of Concerned Farmers (NCF), whose Cropwatch project is seeking to identify farms involved in the Victorian trials, was well aware that Horsham district farmer Greg Petrass has been hosting Bayer GM canola trials on his property.

Petrass 'outed' himself as a participant in Bayer's GM canola trials in an article on the front page of The Age newspaper last Friday. He has leased up to 12 hectares of his farm to Bayer CropScience each year for the past five years to trial the company's Liberty Link herbicide-tolerant experimental canolas.

After the Victorian government refused a Freedom of Information request from Bob Phelps, executive director of the Australian GeneEthics Network, the NCF chartered a light aircraft to seek out and photograph suspected trial sites. The aircraft, guided by ground crew in a car, photographed six suspected trial sites, which are displayed on its web site.

Both The Age and rural newspaper Stock and Land last week published aerial photographs taken by the NCF activists. Petrass told Australian Biotechnology News that the Stock and Land photograph featured his property.

But the NCW activists already knew Petrass was hosting a Bayer CropScience trial on his farm, on Mokepilly Road near Byrneville, 30km north of Horsham. Petrass had personally told NCW coordinator Julie Newman in July last year that he had been hosting the Bayer GM canola trials for the previous four seasons.

On July 24 Newman, who has coordinated the NCF's campaign against GM canola, participated in a debate on the GM canola issue at a Victorian Rural Press Club luncheon held at the RACV's headquarters in Melbourne.

Petrass was on the same panel, as was Bayer CropScience's bioscience manager Susie O'Neill, Victoria's chief scientist Dr Graeme Mitchell, and a senior officer from the Australian Wheat Board, Marcus Kennedy.

Petrass said he was introduced to the panel as a representative of the farmers involved in the Bayer CropScience trials, and confirmed that after the debate, he also had a discussion with Newman about his experience.

Only two of the six properties featured on the NCF web site are of GM trial sites. The NCF's 33 per cent strike rate was no accident -- the location of the second GM trial site was freely available from the web site of the Office of the Gene Technology Regulator (OGTR).

The trial is being conducted under OGTR protocols, which require that the locations of all experimental GM crops involved in the OGTR approval regime be published.

The Petrass farm is not an OGTR site, because it is growing canola varieties that have already been approved by the OGTR, even though they cannot be grown commercially because of a four-year moratorium on GM canola imposed by the Victorian government earlier this year.

The four other sites photographed by NCF are of trial plots of conventionally bred, non-GM hybrid canolas. They are indistinguishable from the GM sites, because they employ the same, small plastic tents to prevent any pollen from nearby canola crops introgressing unwanted genetic material into the new hybrids.

The Network of Concerned Farmers, Greenpeace Australia-Pacific, and the GeneEthics network, which closely coordinate their campaigns, would all have known of the location of the GM crop on the Petrass property.

On the evidence, they chose not to publicise its location, until they launched their coordinated campaign to 'out' the GM farmers, and convince Victorians that the Victorian government and Bayer CropScience were colluding to keep the sites secret.

The 'secret site' campaign also appears to have been launched to coincide with the flowering of Victoria's canola crop, maximising the anti-GM movement's opportunity to publicise the supposed risks of non-GM canola and other crops being 'contaminated' by pollen from GM canola.

Petrass, whose family has been farming in the Horsham area since the mid-1800s, said he had never sought to disguise the fact that he was growing GM canola on his property -- it was common knowledge among farmers in the area. Many other farmers and interested individuals had inspected the GM trials in past years, and this year.

However, he said he signed a confidentiality agreement with Bayer CropScience each year, because it was "nobody else's business" that he was growing a crop that had been approved by the OGTR.

Petrass said the Victorian moratorium "stinks". "My friends, who include most of the bigger, progressive farmers in the Horsham area, would grow GM canola tomorrow if we were allowed to do so," he said.