Grainswest - Winter 2019

Winter 2019 grainswest.com 13 BY MELANIE EPP There was considerable lag time between the discovery of the GMwheat and the CFIA being informed. “That maybe is a risk we want to avoid in the future,” said AWC’s Tom Steve. via a news source and not through trade partners, as should have been the case. “They weren’t officially advised by the Canadian government until after they had seen the media coverage, and that was our concern,” he said. Steve was also troubled that certain stakeholders were aware of the situation before others. He said Monsanto, which is now Bayer CropScience, was informed months prior to the official announce- ment. “If Monsanto was aware of it and government staff were aware of it, why would you not reach out to the stakehold- ers that actually have an investment in the industry?” he said. According to Bayer’s public and indus- try affairs director Trish Jordan, though, the company was not informed about the incident so much as it was asked to co-operate in the CFIA’s investigation. The corporation was contacted in February. “Our role was to try and provide infor- mation that would allow CFIA to confirm what the trait was,” explained Jordan. The CFIA was able to confirm that the plants found were a Monsanto variety (referred to by the corporation as an event), MON 71200, glyphosate-tolerant GM wheat. “The thing that was very surprising to us was that this event and these particu- lar wheat plants were found at least 300 kilometres from any confined research trials—nowhere near where we were ever doing research trials. Our last field trial of glyphosate-tolerant wheat planted in Alberta was in 2004,” she said. “We had a program that ran from 1998 to 2004, but the last time Monsanto tested this particular event was in 2000.” Once the CFIA finished conducting its investigation, said Jordan, it arranged to give a technical briefing on the afternoon of June 14. “We did not have advance no- tice of them going public,” she said. MARKET IMPACT While the incident itself was minor in scale, major markets responded to the discovery. “South Korea and Japan did close their markets until they could verify that these seeds were not in commercial shipments,” said Cam Dahl, president of Cereals Canada. “Japan is our largest value market—not always our largest by volume, but it’s our largest value market— so that does have a significant impact.” Japan is carrying out ongoing testing, said Dahl, but it’s not delaying shipments or preventing wheat from moving into Japan. “At this point, I would characterize this as ‘trade has returned to normal,’” he said. LESSONS LEARNED While the investigation showed that the CFIA’s rigorous system does indeed work, in future, if a similar event should occur, communication protocol could stand improvement. Events like these are good learning experiences, said Dahl. “The CGC and the CFIA do deserve a lot of credit for the science that they car- ried out in order to ensure that the testing was available and that we understood that it wasn’t in the supply chain,” he said. “They did a very good job of those things, and that really did help facilitate getting the market open again. “But [the industry] can do a better job—if something like this were to happen again—in communicating a little bit more in advance with our customers and have better interaction between industry and government,” he concluded. Steve agreed, and added his concern about how long it took the provincial agriculture ministry to inform the CFIA. “We’ve been focusing mostly on the noti- fication process at the end, but there was a considerable amount of time from when those wheat plants survived to it actually getting up to the CFIA,” he said. “And that maybe is a risk we want to avoid in the future, as well.” As for concerns about the timing of the CFIA’s communication with industry and the public, Shearer said the organization is committed to transparency and openness. “The Government of Canada does have an obligation to be sure that any information we provide is credible, complete and true,” said Shearer. “We will be looking into any lessons learned from this and seeing where we can make improvements should there ever be a similar incident in the future,” she concluded.