Political science: behind the GM ban

Almost two months ago, the Victorian Labor government stunned the state's biotechnology industry by imposing a four-year, legislated moratorium on genetically modified (GM) canola cropping.

The industry had expected a May 2003 voluntary moratorium to be lifted -- if not completely, then at least to allow Monsanto and Bayer CropScience to conduct a large-scale commercial coexistence trial.

The reasons for the moratorium, detailed in a March 25 joint press release from premier Steve Bracks and agriculture minister Bob Cameron, make little sense when ranged against what Victoria now stands to lose -- and what it stood to gain by lifting the 2003 voluntary moratorium.

A pro-GM decision was critical to the government's ambition to establish Victoria as one of the world's top five centres for biotechnology research and business by 2010.

The government would have won kudos in the research and business communities for standing up to the anti-GM movement, where the state governments of NSW, SA, WA, Tasmania and the ACT Legislative Assembly had all taken the easy option, in the face of misinformation, scaremongering and political pressure.

A pro-GM decision would also have cemented the state's long-established leadership in the biotech sector, and sent a powerful message to others that it was serious about the industry.

And more tangibly, it would have put money into the pockets of struggling Victorian grain farmers and rural communities. It would have benefited the environment, by replacing an inefficient and obsolescent technology -- triazine-tolerant canolas -- and triazine herbicides, now banned in Europe and the UK on environmental grounds.

It would have given farmers new, higher-yielding varieties that rely on two, manifestly safer and more more environmentally benign herbicides -- glyphosate and glufosinate ammonium. Canola farmers would have benefited from the resulting disease break, and been able to practise conservation tillage, to reduce wind erosion of Australia's notoriously infertile and fragile soils.

Canadian precedent

Science and economics were on the Victorian government's side. And it had the testimony of Canadian farmers, and the judgment of the Office of the Gene Technology Regulator, to counter the anti-GM movement's claims that GM canola posed unacceptable threats to human health and the environment.

Canadian farmers have grown GMHT canola for nine years, without the dire health or environmental problems predicted by the anti-GM movement, for nine years. Significantly, Canada is the world's second largest wheat exporter, yet encounters no segregation or marketing problems.

Finally, the government had authoritative reports from the two independent consultants it appointed itself, which both found there GM canola posed no serious threat to the state's lucrative agricultural exports.

In May last year, the government led Monsanto and Bayer CropScience -- and Victoria's canola farmers -- to believe it was prepared to resist the anti-GM movement.

Its moderate approach -- a 12-month, voluntary halt on commercial trials -- was in sharp contrast to the multi-year, legislated bans announced by other canola-growing states.

Against that background, the government's March announcement of a four-year, legislated ban -- not only on GM canola, but all GM crops -- amounted to an abject capitulation to the anti-GM movement.

It dumbfounded even the pessimists who had expected, at worst, a 12-month extension of the voluntary ban.

The government's volte-face demands explanation.

Taking credit for the ban is a small but highly organised coalition of anti-GM non-government organisations -- Greenpeace Australia-Pacific, the Network of Concerned Farmers, the Australian GeneEthics Network, and organic farming bodies. But how did they persuade the Victorian government to ban a crop that Canadian farmers have grown profitably, safely and with great benefit to the environment, for nearly a decade?

Some commentators have argued that the decision was political contribution to securing Green preferences for federal Labor at this year's election. That argument fails because a 12-month extension of the voluntary moratorium would have served the same purpose.

Dairy dilemma

More plausibly, Bracks was presented with a Faustian dilemma: agree to ban all GM crops for four years, or face the potentially much more serious consequences of having the anti-GM movement target the state's most lucrative primary export industry -- dairying.

The government's press release noted that the state's two biggest dairy companies, Murray-Goulburn Cooperative and Tatura Milk -- had discussed with the government their concerns about the potential impact of GM canola on their export markets.

But Victoria's dairy industry is not GM-free. It already uses two GM products in its production chain.

In a March 2004 report commissioned by the Vicorian government, 'GM Canola Market Impact and Segregation Study', consultants ACIL Tasman state:

"Victoria is also Australia's major dairy producing state. Australian dairy-product exports to over 100 countries around the world average $2.5 billion per year. Virtually all of the dairy cows in Victoria are grazed on pastures with protein and energy supplements contributing approximately 20-30 per cent of the total diet. The majority of this supplement is made up of cereals with 20-30 per cent made from protein meals such as soybean meal (imported), cotton seed meal from NSW and Queensland, and canola meal from the Victorian and NSW canola-crushing industry."

Either the government failed to read its own report, or it has knowingly colluded with the big dairy companies -- and on the evidence, with the anti-GM movement -- to perpetuate a marketing fiction.

Pest-resistant and herbicide-tolerant GM cotton varieties currently account for more than 30 per cent of Australian cotton production, and with the release this season of new Bollgard 2 varieties, which are doubly protected against pest attack, the figure will soon rise to around 80 per cent.

In their national campaign to block GM canola, Greenpeace and the other anti-GM NGOs have relied heavily on a thin-end-of-the-wedge argument that GM canola would be Australia's first GM food crop, and an unacceptable experiment that would put consumer's long-term health at risk.

But Australians have been consuming margarine and cooking oil made from a home-grown, GM oilseed crop -- cotton -- for eight years.

Australian oilseed processors crush around 100,000 tonnes of cotton seed each year, and because there is no segregation of GM and non-GM seed, the GM crush is somewhere around 30,000 tonnes. But, as with GM canola, there is no possibility of an adverse health consequences to consumers from GM-protein component, because all proteins are removed when the oil is refined. The GM protein remains in the high-protein meal, which goes into the high-protein feed supplements fed to Australian beef and dairy cattle.

The imported soy meal referred to by ACIL Tasman is also predominantly GM. It is sourced from the US, where GMHT varieties currently account for 81 per cent of production. The US and other major soy producers, like Brazil and Argentina, do not practise segregation.

Export threat

The anti-GM movement has made a major issue of the risk that 'contamination' by GM canola could threaten Australia's grain exports.

After the government cited the cereal industry's concerns about the impact of GM canola on the state's $1 billion grain exports, AWB Limited and its barley industry counterpart, the Australian Barley Board (ABB), felt it necessary to restate that they support a large-scale coexistence trial. Both AWB and ABB knew the risk of 'contamination' approaches zero -- as the ACIL Tasman report confirms.

The current level of contamination of cereal shipments by non-GM canola offers a baseline for assessing the risk of contamination by GM canola.

The ACIL Tasman report confirms that there is no contamination problem with barley, which accounts for 30 per cent of cereal production in Victoria -- most Victorian barley is sold within Australia, for malting.

Canola seed found in Victorian barley consignments is classified as a 'small foreign seed', and the ABB's own receival standard sets the maximum level in malting barley at 0.6 per cent -- or at 1.2 to 2 per cent for feed barley.

The ACIL Tasman report states:

"Handling companies' representatives have indicated that analysis of historical receival data concludes that only minute quantities of canola that are well below receival tolerances is present in cereals handled in the supply chain. AWB also indicated that levels of Small Foreign Seeds upon export are in most cases well below allowable levels."

If contamination by conventional canola is well below the 0.6 per cent limit set by ABB for malting barley, how much lower would the figure be for GM canola, when measures to avoid contamination of barley and wheat would be far more rigorous?

Toxic argument

And if the Victorian government really does have concerns about the risk of contamination to the state's cereal exports -- or merely, customers' perceptions of such risk -- why did the government select Tiega, in the heart of the barley belt around Ouyen in north-western Victoria, as a potential site for a toxic waste dump?

The threat is not hypothetical: Japanese malting companies that buy Victorian barley are said to have already expressed concern at how their customers might react if Tiega is chosen as the site for the waste dump.

If the grain industry is unconcerned about a coexistence trial, the dairy industry is a different matter.

According to ACIL Tasman, most Victorian dairy farmers are already feeding their cows imported GM soy and Australian GM cotton seed in high-protein feed supplements.

Greenpeace, remarkably, has not drawn attention to this fact, even though it has been campaigning since before Christmas to pressure Australia's largest poultry producer, Ingham's, to stop feeding its chickens GM soy imported from the US.

Greenpeace, in Australia and overseas, employs the wolf pack's tactic for hunting caribou: isolate a weak or vulnerable individual from the herd and harry it into submission.

Ingham's is being subjected to the same adverse publicity -- and consumer pressure -- that Greenpeace has used to coerce big US companies like baby-food manufacturer Gerber, and the Starbucks coffee franchise, into eliminating GM produce from their supply chains.

Before Christmas, Greenpeace activists organised a media stunt in which giant chooks pulling a Santa sleigh delivered a Christmas present of half a tonne of non-GM soy to Ingham's Enterprises in Sydney.

In recent weeks, Greenpeace used its flagship, the Rainbow Warrior, in an attempt to block the departure of a cargo ship, the Rhein, from Port Kembla harbour. The vessel was carrying 6300 tonnes of GM soy, destined to be used in animal feed, to Melbourne. It also picketed the ship when it docked in Melbourne. In a Greenpeace press release, campaign coordinator John Hepburn said: "Imported GE soy is the largest source of GE contamination of the Australian food. Up to 300,000 tonnes of GE soy comes into our food chain unlabelled each year, most of it for use in poultry feed."

In the five months since it began to target Ingham's, Greenpeace has made no mention of the fact that the dairy industry also uses GM soy in its supply chain -- a significant omission, given Greenpeace's zeal in pursuing the anti-GM cause.

Stance, not status

Hepburn has confirmed to Australian Biotechnology News that his organisation is aware that the dairy industry uses up to 5 per cent of GM seeds -- both cotton seed and soy -- in its feed supplements. He also told ABN that Greenpeace has been "working closely" with Victoria's big dairy producers.

For more than two years, Greenpeace has coordinated with the Melbourne-based Australian GeneEthics Network to keep to GM canola -- and imported GM soy -- out of Australia.

GeneEthics' executive director, Bob Phelps, issued a press release when the Rhein docked in Melbourne, calling in Ingham's "to match the dairy industry's GE-free stance".

Phelps, like Hepburn, is surely well aware that Victorian dairy farmers use GM soy in their feed supplements. His choice of the term "anti-GE stance" over "anti-GE status" was deliberate. So the question of why the Victorian government capitulated to the anti-GM movement finds its answer in another question: Why has the anti-GM movement not drawn attention to the fact that Victoria's dairy industry uses GM seed in its supply chain -- and even colluded with the government and the big dairy companies to perpetuate the deception by praising the dairy industry's "GM-free stance"?

From the time that Greenpeace and GeneEthics launched their campaign against Ingham's last December, and GM soy, the Victorian dairy industry's export markets were at risk.

By December, the Victorian government already had the ACIL Tasman report, and a second consultant's report, by Melbourne University economist Emeritus Prof Peter Lloyd, who was appointed to review ACIL Tasman's findings.

Close ties

The anti-GM movement has close connections with the Victorian government that extend even into cabinet.

The intimacy of those links is illustrated by the appearance of a draft of a government press release announcing the moratorium on the web site of the Network of Concerned Farmers (NCW) at least two hours before it was made available to the general media. The release is clearly marked 'DRAFT', and is dated March 24 -- the day before the formal announcement.

Greenpeace helped to fund the establishment of the Network of Concerned Farmers, including the development of its web site, and continues to provide administrative support.

NCW's founder, WA farmer Julie Newman, sought to explain the March 24 dateline on the draft press release as a consequence of the fact that the web site is hosted in the US, across the International Date Line.

Newman also sought to explain small but significant differences between the draft and the final version as errors she had made in transcribing the site.

The NCW clearly received a preview of the press release from someone among the small group of ministers and their staff who were involved in preparing the release -- or who were privy to its content.

Health Minister Bronwyn Pike is a former member of Greenpeace Australia-Pacific's board, as confirmed by her electorate web site.

According to a government source, Pike was the leading advocate for a legislated moratorium. Treasurer and regional development minister John Brumby, together with agriculture minister Bob Cameron, argued strongly for the moratorium to be lifted to allow Lloyd's recommended coexistence trial to proceed.

Normally, Greenpeace and GeneEthics make their demands to government and industry via the mass media. On this occasion, there was no need to publicly threaten the Victorian government or the dairy industry. They needed only to use their friends-in-court to make the alternatives clear: join the Australia-wide, state-based lockout of GM canola, or face potentially much greater cost to the state economy of having the anti-GM movement draw attention to the dairy industry's less-than-virginal GM status.

Fear campaign

According to the ACIL Tasman report, 85 per cent of all dairy products exported from Australia originate in Victoria. Cheese is the most valuable segment -- Japan takes 45 per cent of Victoria's cheese exports.

Like Western consumers, Japanese consumers distrust GM produce. Yet the Japanese dairy and beef industries are prolific consumers of imported GM grain -- including GM canola from Canada.

Had Greenpeace Australia-Pacific been unable to persuade Victoria to impose a moratorium, it could have exploited its global reach to destabilise Japanese consumers' confidence in Victoria's cheese -- and on its past record, would not have hesitated to do so.

Greenpeace's power and ruthlessness was in full view during its international campaign to block food aid shipments from the US to starving African nations, because they were 'contaminated' by GM maize. Greenpeace mounted a campaign against the shipments that extended from the Western media to the highest levels of half a dozen African governments, and down to poor villagers.

But public opinion surveys confirm that even educated Western consumers are highly susceptible to anti-GM disinformation. Greenpeace's Hepburn cites a recent survey by the Commonwealth agency Biotechnology Australia, which found that 66 per cent of Australians considered products from animals fed on GE produce to be GE as well. "The science of GE crops is not well understood by people," Hepburn admits.

Hepburn says Greenpeace's basic position is that it is opposed to the environmental release of GM crops because the science that underpins them is not robust, and the results are inherently unpredictable.

Greenmail

On the evidence, Greenpeace -- with a little help from its activist friends -- greenmailed the Bracks government to join the GM canola moratorium.

The Victorian government, like other state governments, has bought time, but no lasting peace. Greenpeace and GeneEthics are vigilant, and thorough -- they will be back on the offensive long before the state moratoria end in four years' time.

In the interim, Victoria's agbiotech industry will have lost much more than four years of progress in its agbiotech industry. The grains and dairy industries are potentially the biggest beneficiaries of gene technology.

In its panic to avoid the short-term costs to the dairy and grain industries, the state government did not consider the much greater long-term costs to the state: missed commercial opportunities, lost investment, damage to the confidence of the research community and the infant agbiotech industry, and the possible loss of Victoria's status as Australia's number one biotech state.