Hard to Swallow
Ottawa Using Trade Deal as an Excuse
for Not Labelling GM Foods
By LYLE STEWART
March 21, 2002
Montreal Gazette
Canadians owe a debt of gratitude to Peter Phillips. He's the co-chairman of the Canadian Biotechnology Advisory Committee. In a submission to the Commons health committee on Tuesday, Phillips explained as clearly as possible why democracy in this country is on its death bed.
Any attempt to implement mandatory labeling of GM foods, he said, would likely violate trade agreements with the United States. "It would undoubtedly complicate our relations with our major trading partner, the United States, and complicate the access of our market into their market and vice-versa," Phillips told the committee.
Phillips appeared to be saying Canadians have lost the right to know what they are consuming - perhaps even to protect their own health - to corporate power and profits.
That's not likely the conclusion Phillips wanted people to draw. He is, after all, very much in favour of pushing biotechnology on an unwilling public. As taxpayers, we even pay him to do so in his role as the federally financed Chair in Managing Knowledge-based Agri-food Development at the University of Saskatchewan. Phillips' research program concentrates on issues related to intellectual property rights (i.e., privatizing the genetic code in foodstuffs), market access and consumer acceptance of agricultural biotechnology products.
Despite the tens of millions of hidden taxpayer dollars thrown into the PR battle on behalf of the biotechnology industry, however, the consumer acceptance battle has largely been lost. Surveys of public attitudes toward GM foods consistently show near-unanimity in Canada and elsewhere for mandatory labeling. But the agri-food and grocery-retailing industries already know any label would send consumers scurrying.
That's why the advisory committee Phillips co-chairs wants a voluntary labeling regime, as it expressed in an interim report issued last summer. That in itself isn't surprising since Ottawa, in violation of its own guidelines, heavily stacked the committee in favour of biotech stakeholders with a vested self-interest in the issue.
The Canadian General Standards Board policy on balanced representation says, in the context of a standards committee, "no single category of interest representation can dominate the voting procedures of the committee." But the committee is overwhelmingly dominated by biotech industry representatives, their third-party front groups, university biotechnology researchers and government officials whose mandate is to force GM foods onto grocery shelves in Canada and abroad.
Despite this, the committee appears stuck. Its work should have wrapped up by now, but it hasn't yet found a way to successfully spin the labeling issue without raising major public-opinion alarm bells across the country. Thus, Phillips's new argument NAFTA or the WTO would lead to heavy trade sanctions from the U.S.
It's obviously a fall-back position, a Plan B-style big stick to batter Canadians into submission. It also clearly defines the clear and present danger these trade agreements represent not only for our simple right to know, but for the health of our bodies, environment and democracy.
The big stick is consistent with other blows NAFTA has inflicted on Canadians in the past. Ethyl Corporation's successful NAFTA challenge against the ban on the dangerous gasoline additive MMT four years ago appears to have opened the floodgates to a series of suits designed to overturn almost any environmental or health regulation.
That prospect doesn't appear to overly trouble the Liberal braintrust in Ottawa. But politically, the federal government cannot be seen to be willy-nilly surrendering the right to create or preserve healthy communities to corporate greed. And this is where NAFTA works its insidious magic. By leaving the dirty work to teams of corporate lawyers and secretive, unaccountable trade tribunals, Ottawa (or Washington, for that matter) can say, "We have no choice. Our hands are tied."
It's a willing captivity, of course. By stalling for years, the government has allowed GM foods to invade our supermarkets, and for the genetic contamination of our environment, leading to the increasing impossibility of growing organic, GM-free crops. If the essence of democracy is informed choice, Canadians are being deprived of both the information they need and their right to choose.
Lyle Stewart is a Montreal writer.
Bradford Duplisea is an independent Ottawa-based researcher
who often works on health care and food safety issues for the Canadian Health Coalition.
He can be reached at:
Tel.: (819) 770-1626
Brad@Duplisea.ca
Click here to read more GM food exposés based on Access-to-Information research by Bradford Duplisea