Contaminating Canada’s Seed Supply

GRAIN

In Canada, the privatisation of farmer’s seeds continues to advance at a breathtaking pace. Canadian farmers have fewer and fewer varieties of seed to choose from, fewer places to buy it from and fewer rights to produce their own seed. Now they face another threat: the contamination of the entire seed supply with genetically modified seed.

Plant breeding in Canada is in the midst of a radical and rapid transformation. The previous framework of plant breeding, based on a collective process of information and seed exchange, farmer participation and seed saving, and a mandate to maximise the public good, is being replaced by a framework of exclusive property rights and private profit. Public breeding programmes have been gutted. Farmer seed saving and plant breeding practices have been criminalised. The Canadian seed supply, built on generations of farmer and public sector plant breeding, is being taken over by a handful of transnational seed and pesticide corporations.

The same processes are underway in other countries, but they are particularly advanced in Canada, where the government has pursued a national biotechnology strategy since the early 1980s and where genetically modified (GM) crops already occupy a considerable portion of agricultural land. Sixty-five percent of Canada’s oilseed rape (canola) crop was genetically engineered for herbicide resistance in 2002. [1] In the same year, GM crops were grown on 3.5 million hectares in Canada, up 9% from the previous year. A close look at the situation in Canada provides a chilling example of the implications of the transnational seed industry’s agenda for farmers in the rest of the world. What is new to the picture is industry’s role in deliberately contaminating the seed supply.

Breeding for the common good

There are two characteristics of Canadian agriculture that define plant breeding in the country. First, few of Canada’s major crops are native to North America. Indigenous peoples in certain areas of Canada had highly developed agricultural systems before the Europeans arrived, growing crops such as squash, sunflower, beans, and maize. Some of these indigenous varieties were grown on the farms of European settlers into the 20th century. [2] But, by and large, Canada’s current agricultural biodiversity is relatively new and based on varieties from abroad. Canada’s short-season soybean crop is based on farmers’ varieties from the Sakhalin Islands of northern Japan. [3] [4] Nearly every variety of wheat grown in Canada is a descendant of Marquis wheat – a cross of a farmer’s variety from the Ukraine with a farmer’s variety from India. Canola (a kind of oilseed rape with a particular oil quality) was developed by Canadian public breeders working with descendants of a rapeseed variety brought by a farmer from Poland in 1927. [5]

Second, few varieties grown in other parts of the world are adaptable to Canada’s unique ecological conditions. The big breakthrough with wheat occurred when a Canadian farmer introduced a variety that he received from a friend in Glasgow, who collected the seeds from a ship sailing from Poland carrying wheat from the Ukraine. The Canadian government undertook extensive collection missions to find a better variety, but found none. So public breeders turned to difficult and time-consuming crosses to try and improve Canadian wheat. [6]

Canada does not have ideal seed markets for the transnational seed industry. It takes a lot of breeding work to develop varieties for Canada’s relatively small markets. From a seed industry standpoint, the returns on investment for most crops are inadequate. This is not the case for the public sector, where returns are measured according to the public good the investment creates. Farmers, consumers, and the downstream food and feed industry in particular all benefit from plant breeding and it has always been carried out with the larger objective of national economic development.

Traditionally, crop development has been an informal partnership between public breeders, farmers and government. In the early 1980s, the public sector still accounted for 100% of formal plant breeding for cereals and oilseeds. [7] The government provided the financial support and farmers were responsible for the multiplication and diffusion of public varieties and seed saving. Public breeders distributed their seeds to certain farmers to carry out the first two generations of multiplication. The seed was then distributed to more farmers, who multiplied it into registered and then certified seed. The certified seed was then sold to farmers, who continued to take care of the seed by saving it for themselves, or selling it to, or sharing it with their neighbours.

Farm-saved seed has traditionally provided the bulk of Canada’s seed supply. In 1978, there was only enough certified seed available for 14% of the seeded area for wheat, 31% for barley, and 30% for oats. [8] With most crops, farmers only bought seed when they felt that the quality of their seed was deteriorating. Farmers might save their seeds for upwards of six generations without any need for new certified seed, since they did an excellent job of maintaining the quality of their seed from year to year. One study in the province of Alberta in 1980 found that 60% of the farmer-saved seed surveyed was equal to the highest quality seed on the market. [9] The public good of farm-saved seed is rarely considered, but when farmers save seed they take the cost of producing, distributing and marketing new seed out of the production process. This translates into a saving of millions of dollars every year.

In this traditional partnership the returns on plant breeding were not measured by seed sales but by the overall contribution that these made to agriculture and the food system. This breeding framework has always made sense for Canadian agriculture. But in the 1970s and 1980s, the Canadian government, caught up in the hype of biotechnology and the transnational chemical industry’s decision to invest in the seed market, decided to reorient policy. Establishing a private seed and agricultural biotechnology industry became its new priority, and conflicts with the traditional plant breeding framework became inevitable.

A sharp change in direction

The private seed industry could not make a profit in Canada on its own. The Canadian government provided hundreds of millions of dollars to the seed industry in direct subsidies, tax credits and matching public-private partnership grants. [10] It also introduced or modified laws and regulations to give the seed industry more control over the seed supply and to curtail or eliminate the participation of farmers and public breeders. These interventions were designed to eliminate public goods, like seed saving, for the sake of private profit.

In just twenty years, the seed industry and the government have reduced the old partnership to tatters. The foundations of the old system – the free exchange of germplasm and the active participation of farmers in the seed supply – are on the verge of disappearing. The transformation was deliberate, but the ways through which it took place and continues to operate are not easy to decipher. The transnational seed industry cleverly disguised its agenda to avoid opposition. This article aims to demystify one of the transnational seed industry’s efforts to advance its interests: the deliberate genetic contamination of the seed supply.

Cashing in on contamination

Most major food crops in Canada are self-pollinating and highly stable. Farmers can save seeds from year to year without any serious impact on quality or performance. Until recently, seed “purity” was simply a technical matter of making sure that seeds were properly selected, cleaned, and stored. Genetic “contamination” was a meaningless concept.

With the introduction of GM crops, genetic contamination has become a major concern. Consumers in Europe and Japan, Canada’s most important agricultural export markets, refuse to eat GM foods and Canadian farmers growing GM crops have lost markets. So have conventional farmers because the seed industry has deliberately contaminated conventional and organic grain supplies. It has done this by introducing GM varieties into a system where contamination is bound to occur, either by mixing during grain handling, cross-pollination, or the persistence of GM crops in fields. This is particularly the case with oilseed rape, which has the largest area planted to GM plants in Canada. Unwanted GM oilseed rape is turning up all over the place in western Canada. According to Robert Stevenson, a Saskatchewan farmer who has never planted GM oilseed rape: “It’s close to being as thick as a crop. Crop insurance considers nine plants per square metre to be a viable canola crop. Without even trying I have four [GM canola] plants per square metre. This for me is a new weed, and it’s here in very significant numbers”. [11] The widespread contamination creates indirect problems for farmers as well. Monsanto, the leading GM oilseed rape company in Canada, claims that all oilseed rape plants in farmer’s fields containing their patented Roundup Ready gene belong to them, even if plants arrived in the fields accidentally or the gene was transferred through cross-pollination. The Federal Court of Canada recently upheld Monsanto’s interpretation in a case between the company and Percy Schmeiser, an oilseed rape farmer from Saskatchewan (see box). [12]

Contamination is not only happening in farmers’ fields. A number of studies show that the pedigreed oilseed rape seed supply is deeply contaminated. Researchers at the University of Manitoba conducted a survey of 27 pedigree seed lots of oilseed rape in 2002. [13] Of the 27 seed lots, [14] had contamination levels above 0.25% and three seed lots had glyphosate resistance contamination levels in excess of 2.0%. Oilseed rape breeder Keith Downey suspects that, “There are varieties of certified seed out there, in which part of the level of contamination is coming right from the breeders’ seed.”14 Walter Fehr, an agronomist and director of the Office of Biotechnology at Iowa State University says the same is true of other crops, such as soybeans and maize. [15] If the breeder seed supply is contaminated then the whole system is contaminated and it will be hard to find any fields that can be considered GM free. A recent report suggests that even Canadian wheat (the GM version of which has not yet been approved) may be contaminated, since researchers were testing Roundup Ready wheat at a national experimental station alongside plots of wheat destined for commercial seed growers. [16] The extent of the penetration of contaminated seed into the seed supply is now so deep that segregating GM from non-GM seed will not help at this point.

Only upstream mechanisms, such as regulation, can now prevent contamination. One tool that should be able to help is Canada’s varietal registration system, which was set up to protect farmers from the introduction of varieties with negative impacts. All new agricultural plant varieties are tested for agronomic performance, disease resistance and end-use quality and only those varieties that are at least equal to the best varieties available are allowed on the market. But the varietal registration system has its limitations. Committees of “experts” - composed primarily of formal plant breeders and scientists, commercial seed growers and commodity group representatives – make the final decisions. The committees are not democratic and the varietal registration system is biased towards industrial agricultural systems (as opposed to ecological agriculture). Nor is the system designed to assess GM varieties.

When the first GM varieties came through the registration system, the evaluation committee took the unprecedented step of awarding bonus points for herbicide resistance (the varieties probably would not have been approved otherwise). [17] Now that the negative implications of GM crops are apparent, the committees should be able to deduct points from GM varieties where there are negative consequences for farmers. But instead the Canadian government, in close collaboration with the seed industry, is moving rapidly in the opposite direction. It is using the introduction of GM crops and the privatisation of plant breeding as a pretext to strip the varietal registration system of its capacity to fulfil its mandate.

Agriculture and Agri-food Canada (AAFC), Canada’s department of agriculture, has put forward a proposal to overhaul the varietal registration system. The number of recommending committees will be cut from 20 to six. [18] Certain crops – wheat, oilseed rape, barley, rye, triticale, oat, mustard, pea and sunflower – will continue to be tested for agronomic merit, but the criteria will include only quality and/or disease resistance. Only one year of performance information will be required, instead of three. [19] This appears to be a token gesture to appease critics because, as Rob Graf, a research scientist with AAFC, suggests: “For yield and some other agronomic traits, environment has tremendous influence, which means that one year of data cannot provide a reliable prediction of long-term performance”. [20] Kevin Falk, another AAFC breeder, says that, “You need four years, maybe more” to measure yield. [21]

The government and the seed industry have no interest in strengthening the current regulatory system to deal with genetic contamination. They have a very different system in mind for segregation and regulation. Once undressed, what this “identity-preservation” system really is is a way to shift the responsibility for genetic contamination on to farmers, while boosting seed sales.

The term “Identity Preservation” is everywhere in Canadian government circles these days. It’s one of those catchy labels that fits in well with the current discourse of globalisation: where the future of agriculture is seen as an integrated ‘field-to-fork’ system responding to an increasing number of ‘value-added’ niche markets. The claim is that an Identity Preservation system will “preserve the identity of specific lots of grain from farm to market” and give Canada a “significant competitive advantage”. [22] Ironically, the system is actually set up to do the opposite, since instead of preserving the identity of Canadian seed, it will occlude it, thereby stripping Canadian farmers of their competitive advantage.

There is a larger story behind the rhetoric. The Canadian prairies already has a system to protect Canada’s competitive advantage. The current Kernel Visual Distinguishability [23] and variety registration systems are designed to work together to maintain the quality of Canadian exports and guarantee farmers premium prices on the world market. These systems are the cornerstones of the Canadian Wheat Board, a farmer-controlled organisation that markets wheat and barley grown by western Canadian farmers. The actual problem for farmers is not with securing competitive advantage but with preventing the competitive disadvantages caused by the introduction of GM varieties and low-quality varieties, which the proposed system will exacerbate. The Identity Preservation scheme is really a way to allow more varieties on the market – varieties that are rejected by export markets or do not live up to the standards of the current system. It is a way to break apart the Canadian Wheat Board to let big players like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland Company take over the grain trade and Monsanto and Syngenta take over the seed supply. It is also a way to shift the costs and responsibility of contamination onto farmers growing non-GM crops. As pointed out by Bill Toews, a wheat farmer from southern Manitoba: “What [the Identity Preservation system is] trying to do is introduce a lower-value variety [the GM variety] into a stream that has a relatively higher value”. This, says Toews, will “add a segregation cost which will be shifted from the GM crop to the non-GM crop, because it is a higher-value crop that we are trying to protect. Why [as farmers] do we want to do that?” [24]

Holding farmers to ransom

There is another important element in the larger “Identity Preservation” agenda, which revolves around the seed industry’s scheme for an “Affidavit System”. This proposed system requires farmers to sign a written guarantee testifying to the variety of their crop when they drop their harvests off at grain elevators. The assumption here is that grain can be segregated by maintaining the “identity” of the variety through the grain handling system. But let’s be clear. This is not an effective system for preventing genetic contamination. The seed supply is contaminated, so knowing the variety is no indication of genetic purity. This is a trap to prevent farmers from saving seed.

The seed industry is well aware that, under the Canada Seeds Act, farmers can only declare the variety name of their crops if the crops are grown with pedigreed seed. According to a January 2003 position paper by the Canadian Seed Trade Association (CSTA) on the Affidavit System: “A legal opinion obtained by the CSTA confirms the reality that only crops planted with pedigreed seed can be identified by a variety name in the grain handling and processing system . . . We recognise the concerns of industry stakeholders with mandating the use of certified seed. Where products are to be sold by “class”, the CSTA supports a middle ground position of not requiring the crop to have been planted with certified seed. However, the grower must be able to prove the purchase of certified seed of that variety in recent years. In cases where the grain handler or processor is claiming the grain is identity-preserved the requirement for the use of pedigreed seed must be complete.”

It’s hard to overstate the arrogance in this statement. First, grain handlers have been sorting farmer-saved seed by class without a problem since the classification system began in Canada. Why should farmers all of a sudden have to prove the use of certified seed in recent years? Second, as every farmer or decent plant scientist knows, you do not need to use certified seed to preserve the genetic “identity” of a variety. Farm-saved seed can cause agronomic problems if the seed is not properly handled, but this will not affect its quality for the end-user – unless, of course, the crop is at risk of contamination from GM crops. But, the seed industry, not the farmer is responsible for this. It is mighty unfair to penalise farmers by making them buy seed every year for a problem created by those selling seed. This is especially true when the pedigreed seed supply is as seriously contaminated as farmer’s fields, a problem that the seed industry itself admits to. [25]

The CSTA’s suggestions would be laughable if it were not for the fact that they are in the process of being implemented. AAFC supports the creation of an identity-preservation system and it has turned responsibility for setting it up over to the Canadian Seed Institute, a “not-for-profit, industry-led organisation” founded by the CSTA and the Canadian Seed Growers Association and managed by a board of industry representatives. [26] In November 2001, AAFC Minister Lyle Vanclief announced the allocation of $1.2 million to the Canadian Seed Institute to help develop its Market Delivery Value Assurance Program. According to the AAFC announcement, the program will “help develop standards and audit procedures, as well as launch a research program to verify grain purity, develop an internet-based tracking system requiring key information during each step of the handling process, and create a national third-party certification body.” This is yet another instance of public money being used for private profit.

These developments are really bad news for farmers. They are under attack from all sides. The combination of patents, plant breeders’ rights, grower’s contracts, and the looming changes to the registration and classification system leaves them with no room to do plant breeding, save seeds or exercise influence over formal plant breeding programs. More and more, the new varieties that come to market will reflect a set of interests that has nothing to do with them. “Choice” will be an empty word for farmers. All the benefits from this transformation will go to a small number of transnational corporations, even as the new varieties they produce will continue to be based on the accumulated agricultural biodiversity of farmers, in Canada and abroad, and the preceding investment in plant breeding by the public sector. The interests of the Canadian public, not just the interests of farmers, are being sold down the river by its very own government.

People take back the seed supply

The seed industry and the Canadian government have cornered the public. Some people have tried to take refuge in the organic option, but the combination of laws and regulations that support the seed industry, the deliberate GM contamination, and the dismantling of public sector research programs are quickly turning this option into a dead end. The only possibility left is to fight back.

Farmers are leading the charge. Organic farmers in Saskatchewan, spurred by the GM contamination of virtually all oilseed rape and the looming introduction of Roundup Ready wheat, formed the Organic Agriculture Protection Fund in June 2001. The Fund is pursuing a class-action lawsuit against Monsanto and Aventis for making it impossible to grow organic oilseed rape and has initiated a nationwide campaign, with the National Farmers Union (NFU) and several other farmers’ organisations and NGOs, to stop the introduction of GM wheat. [27] Various farmer-led initiatives to prevent genetic contamination are popping up elsewhere in Canada.

There are also signs of unrest in the public sector breeding community. Several breeders have spoken out publicly against intellectual property rights and the dismantling of the varietal registration system and public breeding programs. Others are proposing alternative directions for public...
programmes. Frustrated by the increasing scope of intellectual property rights, Tom Michaels, the Associate Dean of the Ontario Agricultural College, is working on a proposal for a General Public Licensing system for plant varieties that would keep plant varieties and their descendants freely available for use in any breeding program. [28]

These various voices need to come together. There is no reason to believe that the current trend cannot be stopped. The industry lobby is much weaker than its appearance suggests. It is essentially a small elite of scientists and business people, heavily tied to the transnational biotech industry, who have managed to co-opt government for their own purposes. They are deeply dependent on government support and intervention, but do not have the confidence of a sceptical Canadian public. [29] In order to stop the seed industry’s reckless and deliberate contamination of Canadian agriculture and its take-over of the seed supply, people have to take government back into their own hands. This is no small task since the window of opportunity is growing smaller by the day, but it is by no means unachievable.

Reference for this article: GRAIN, 2003, Contaminating Canada’s Seed Supply, Seedling, April 2003, GRAIN

Website link: www.grain.org/seedling/seed-03-04-2-en.cfm

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