Australia lagging as GM industry grows

One of the founders of Australia’s leading private wheat-breeding company has delivered a bleak prognosis for the commercial future of GM crops in Australia.

Speaking at the recent BioFestival conference on agricultural biotechnology in Melbourne, Dr Ian Edwards, ex-CEO of Perth-based GrainBiotech, warned that the state moratoriums on new GM crops across southern Australia were already having a serious impact on Australian agriculture’s future.

The area planted with GM crops worldwide was still expanding at a double-digit rate and would reach 70 to 75 million hectares by the end of 2004, in what Edwards described as “one of the most rapid and dramatic uptakes of a new technology in history”.

Much of the expansion is occurring in developing nations like India, China, South Africa and Brazil. South Africa, which is growing GM cotton and maize, already had four times Australia’s area of GM crops.

“GM has fundamentally changed the way we look at crops,” Edwards said. “Previously, we were very much commodity-based, but people are now thinking about end-user traits in second- and third generation GM crops.”

Edwards said Australia has the most rigorous regulatory system in the world for GM crops, and the national GM watchdog, the Office of the Gene Technology Regulator (OGTR) has granted 34 licenses for field testing of GM crops.

The OGTR had investigated the release of seven varieties of GM canola and concluded that they pose no greater risk to human health, safety and the environment than non-GM canola.

But GM cotton, first planted in Australia in 1996, is still the only GM field crop in commercial production in Australia.

While the OGTR has approved commercial production of herbicide-tolerant GM canolas, the five southern states – Western Australia South Australia, NSW, Victoria and Tasmania – have either imposed moratoriums on canola, or declared themselves GM-free.

This was despite a 2002 report by the Commonwealth Productivity Commission which concluded GM crops had the potential to make agriculture in Australia more sustainable, and to expand the nation’s range of agricultural products.

Australia had built an entire non-GM canola industry based on the herbicide triazine, now banned in Europe because it contaminates groundwater, while foregoing the opportunity to establish an industry based on much safer herbicides.

“Australian [agriculture] ministers haven’t listened to the realities of the world, to the markets, and they have certainly not listened to the OGTR,” Edwards said.

“Who have they listened to? I think we can guess.”

Edwards said the state moratoriums would force investors to consider the implications of further GM trait investments in crops with no assured commercial outcomes.

“The lack of consistency between the states in GM commercialisation makes international investment unlikely, and will adversely impact the environment,” he said.

“There is concern about the recruitment of new graduates into the agbiotech industry – there will be fewer jobs as companies put investment on hold.”

Edwards said it was a pity that critics of GM technology focused on the mechanism by which products were developed, instead of looking at the safety of the end-product.

He said Australia had a “moral responsibility” to develop and commercialise GM crops.

Edwards showed a map of the current area of agricultural soil lost to salinity in WA, and another projecting a fourfold increase by 2030.

“GrainBiotech has been testing a GM wheat that grows at 40 per cent of the concentration of seawater in the glasshouse, and we want to get it through the regulatory nightmare to test it next year,” he said.

Future opportunities for agbiotech companies to commercialise new GM crops, or new traits, would be limited by the cost of compliance with Australia’s stringent regulatory system.

Cotton, canola and wheat would remain key targets – in wheat, the improvements would be in the area of increased tolerance of salinity, drought and frost, and improved nutritional value.

Monsanto announced earlier this year it was withdrawing an application to grow the first GM wheat in North America – a variety carrying Monsanto’s Roundup Ready herbicide-tolerance gene.

Edwards said the acreage of spring wheat planted in the US was actually declining as more growers switched to growing GM soybeans, a more profitable crop.

He described Monsanto’s withdrawal, due to lack of grower support, and concerns about buyer resistance in GM-averse global markets, as a “temporary setback”.

Experiments with GM wheat predict a 14 to 16 per cent yield increase over conventional wheat due to improved weed control, and a 62 per cent reduction in dockage and cleaning costs because of reduced weed-seed contamination.

These savings translated to an increased profit of US$51 per hectare, greater than for GM soy. But wheat was lagging behind other GM grains and oilseeds because of its more complex genetics, the lower profits available from the sale of seed for a commodity crop.

Wheat was also lagging because of strong competition for biotech investment capital from corn, soybeans and canola.