Canada's GM Food Fight
By LYLE STEWART
Montreal Gazette
March 29, 2002
Sometimes it's hard to know where the science fiction ends and reality begins in the food fight over genetic engineering.
The overwhelming visual association I get from the biotech industry's television advertising on the subject is with the 1970s sci-fi classic Soylent Green. In the movie's depiction of the death room - right before a character is rendered into foodstuffs for the teeming urban masses - the dying person is bombarded with idyllic video images of sun-dappled fields and natural wonders, a soothing mind massage before being fed into the food factory.
Compare that to the advertising campaign of the Council for Biotechnology Information, called "Good Ideas Are Growing." The council relies pretty much on the same imagery: sun-drenched green crops surrounding an old-fashioned barn on the prairie; the healthy, tanned farm family rocking gently on a rope swing; a sturdy Third World peasant at work in fields of bounty.
What they don't show you are courtroom scenes in which huge multinational corporations put family farmers out of business because their crops became contaminated with patented genetic varieties. They don't show the massive corporate lobbying of political decision-makers. They don't show honest government scientists being silenced with gag orders while taxpayer-supported public relations for the biotech industry is presented as "science-based" information.
Reality Check Needed
It all cries out for a truth-in-advertising reality check. And the reality is that the federal government and the biotech industry - it's almost impossible now to distinguish between the two - do not want you to know what you are consuming. It's a so-far successful policy of obfuscation and delay on the issue of labeling GMOs at the expense of Canadian consumers and exporters.
Take some of last week's otherwise fascinating testimony to the Commons standing committee on health. Dr. Alan Wildeman of the University of Guelph - one of the centres for biotech research in Canada - told the committee that labeling would cost producers up to 10 per cent of the retail food price.
"Producers will be pushed to a thinner profit margin since they don't set the price of the commodities that are going into the food products that we eat," Wildeman said. "If we are forced to label at that price ... the farmer will get squeezed on it. As someone who grew up on a prairie farm in Saskatchewan, I would argue that there is not a lot of margin to squeeze any more."
So there's the pro-biotech position: labeling will put the family farmer out of business. The reality is that GM products are rapidly achieving the same effect by increasing corporate control of agriculture, and by eliminating export markets around the world that demand genetic identification or bar outright imports of GM crops.
It's too bad Wildeman was late for the committee hearing, because he would have benefited from listening to Dr. John Fagan of Genetic I.D. Inc., of Fairfield, Iowa. Fagan pointed out that the prerequisites for mandatory labeling - testing and identity preservation - are already working effectively in many countries around the world.
Little Cost
And the cost? "Negligible," Fagan said. With large-scale shipments, determining GM content raises costs by 0.6 per cent. With smaller scale containers of, say, 20 tons of food grade soy, costs may be up to 1.6 per cent.
And Fagan emphasized mandatory labeling makes economic sense. "Introduction of GMOs into Canada and the U.S. has actually led to significant loss of export markets," he said. "Those markets will begin to gain or regain confidence in Canada's ability to provide the kinds of products that they want and those lost markets will be regained. It is, in my view, the most important argument for taking on a labeling program of this sort that allows Canada to join the rest of the world instead of being marginalized in this way."
Indeed, reading the committee transcript in full, demonstrates how full of holes are government and industry objections to mandatory labeling.
Judy Wasylycia-Leis, the NDP MP for Winnipeg North Centre and a member of the health committee, said she was almost embarrassed the only in-depth, thorough and thoughtful testimony has come from Americans. As she commented to me yesterday, "Our own scientists appeared to be walking advertisements for GMO products."
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