GMO alfalfa furor crosses borders

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

by BETTER FARMING STAFF

Canada’s agriculture industry is taking stock of a U.S. Supreme Court decision concerning genetically engineered alfalfa.

Supporters and opponents of commercialization of the glyphosate tolerant technology both claim the June 21 decision as a victory for their camps.

In the United States, Forage Genetics International, which has a stake in developing the variety, says the court decision “confirms the importance of the use of safe, beneficial technologies such as Roundup Ready alfalfa to generate the food production that will be needed to feed a growing global population."

In Canada, the National Farmers Union, which generally opposes genetically modified technologies, says the decision makes the commercialization of the alfalfa in Canada less likely. “Work on an EIS (environmental impact study) and possible deregulation will take at least a year, possibly much longer, giving farmers and others opposed to GM alfalfa time to gain a permanent ban.”

But spokesmen from Canada’s seed trade and Ontario’s forage sectors say it’s not yet clear what impact the decision will have on the commercialization of the alfalfa here.

Ray Robertson, manager of the Ontario Forage Council, says allowing the variety to be produced on this side of the border is “a very contentious issue.” He says the council has not determined a position.

Canada is the world’s third largest exporter of forages. Many of the countries that receive Canadian hay won’t accept genetically modified products, he explains.

The Canadian Seed Trade Association will not take a position says Bill Leask, executive vice-president.

Delivered Monday, the Supreme Court decision rules that the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit had overstepped its authority when it upheld a previous California Divisional Court decision. That decision barred the Animal Plant Health Inspection Service from deregulating the alfalfa and banned the planting and marketing of the variety pending the outcome of an environmental impact statement.

U.S. law requires genetically engineered products to be regulated, tightly controlling their sale and distribution. To relieve these controls, an application to the inspection service must be made to deregulate the product.

Obtaining an EIS is part of the deregulation process. However the inspection service can waive this requirement if a shorter environmental assessment indicates that the product won’t have significant impact. That’s what happened with the Roundup Ready alfalfa. It was well on its way to commercialization in 2005 — it had been deregulated and planted on 220,000 acres in the United States — when conventional alfalfa farms and environmental groups took the inspection service’s deregulation decision to court.

Among other things, they argued that the service should have obtained an EIS.

Appeals to the Supreme Court were launched by the U.S. government, Monsanto Inc, which owns the technology, and Forage Genetics, which licensed it and was developing the seed. The Supreme Court decision on Monday sends the decision back to lower courts and:

allows the inspection service to deregulate the variety, ruling that it needs the power to impose a partial deregulation while it conducts an EIS;

concludes the District Court erred in its nation-wide ban on planting the variety, noting that it is “a drastic and extraordinary remedy, which should not be granted as a matter of course."

Seven of eight Supreme Court judges supported this decision (one removed himself because his brother delivered the initial ruling). The lone dissenting judge wrote that the inspection service had tried to deregulate the variety without an EIS despite “ample evidence of potential environmental harms.”

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s plant biosafety office approved the technology as safe for food, feed and environment in 2005. But Leask says there are no registered varieties that contain it.

A bill that passed second reading in the House of Commons and was sent to the Agricultural Standing committee for review could make it difficult for Roundup Ready alfalfa’s developers to obtain variety registration in Canada. The bill proposes to make the registration of genetically modified seeds contingent on how other countries view them. With Parliament adjourned for the summer, the bill won't be addressed until fall, Leask says. BF