LionelPort.com

Food giant says consumers don’t want GM (Australia)

The head of Australia’s biggest food company says biotechnology companies only have themselves to blame for consumers continuing to reject genetically-modified canola.

Bans on GM canola crops ended last week in Victoria, and in New South Wales today.

Max Ould, chairman of Goodman Fielder, says he won’t back the lifting of the moratoria, because customers don’t want GM products, and have never been engaged in the process.

“Most of our consumer research has indicated they would prefer not to have genetically-modified material in their products,” he says.

“Our biggest stakeholder are our customers, and our customers have not been brought along the journey of genetic modification.

“If we do things our consumers don’t want, we don’t stay in business”.

Source:
ABC Rural
03/03/2008

China’s Genetically Altered Food Boom

In the wake of poisonings in Japan linked to Chinese-made dumplings, last week brought a fresh wave of scrutiny to China’s control over its food industry. In 2006 and 2007, European officials discovered an unauthorized variety of genetically modified (GM) rice made in China — illegal in both Europe and China — in processed food exported to European Union nations.

Last Tuesday, the European Commission enacted an emergency regulation on Chinese food imports: Starting April 15, food products containing Chinese rice will require mandatory certification that they’ve been tested for the experimental GM variety called Bt63.

The measure underscores a discomfort in the West with China’s growing dominance in the business of inventing and selling genetically modified seed. Faced with feeding every fifth person on the planet with less than one-tenth of the world’s farmland, Beijing has been pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into transgenic crop research and development, hoping the plants, whose DNA is combined with genetic material that programs them with traits like pest and weed resistance, will help farmers yield more food and commodities at a lower cost — especially as farmland is being lost to development and drought. Most of China’s cotton is already transgenic, and rice, wheat, maize, soybeans and livestock are in the pipeline. “China decided that conventional technology would not allow it to feed its people,” says Clive James, chairman and founder of the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications (ISAAA). In the 12 years since GM crops have been commercially grown, James says most planting has been in the Americas. “I believe that the second decade will be the decade of Asia,” he says.

It’s a shift that’s causing second thoughts on both sides of this enduringly controversial technology. The United States is the world’s most enthusiastic adopter of GM crops, growing vast amounts of crops like herbicide-tolerant soybeans and insect-resistant corn; here, the seeds of globally operating companies like Monsanto and DuPont have passed health and environmental muster. While U.S. regulators have determined GM foods are safe to eat, China’s fast growth raises the question of whether one country’s health safety trials can translate in another. “We’ve been saying, ‘Trust us,’” says Gregory Jaffe, director of the Biotechnology Project at the Center for Science in the Public Interest in Washington. “Now the shoe is on the other foot. And we’re not sure we like that system.”

In Europe, where consumer acceptance of GM food has always been lower than in the U.S., concerns over the incidents of Bt63 contamination may be rooted less in anxiety over China’s safety standards than in a more general worry over the ever-increasing use of GM crops around the world. China, after all, is not alone in its transgressions: the U.S. has also had major incidents of its GM plants showing up in the wrong food chains, costing big trade dollars from GM-wary nations. Last year, Gene Watch UK, a watchdog group that works with Greenpeace, recorded 39 worldwide incidents of illegal GM plants found in food supplies, or approved GM plants found in countries where they are illegal. Becky Price, who helps maintain Gene Watch UK’s public list of global GM contamination, says keeping track of these plants is still far from a perfect science. “Nobody has demonstrated how to grow a GM food crop and stop it from getting into the food chain,” says Price. “It’s a ridiculous concept.”

Beijing is listening. Long before last week’s announcement from the EC, Chinese officials were aware of the risks — particularly to its global image — in moving too fast on developing and trading its own GM food crops. So far, only a handful of minor food plants like papaya, tomato and bell pepper have been approved for commercial planting in China. A few years back, many scientists believed it would be the first nation in the world to give the thumbs up to genetically modified rice varieties like Bt63. But after Greenpeace found unapproved GM rice seed for sale in a Chinese market in 2003, and when illegal rice also started to show up in processed noodles in Europe, China’s Ministry of Agriculture appeared to back off. Now the experimental varieties are stuck in testing paddies around the country, and biotech labs’ funds are starting to be depleted by the costly requirement of buying back and destroying the rice from the farmers who grow it. “There’s no indication that if you continue, you’ll get approved,” says Jikun Huang, Director of the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Though the amount of rice exported from China is small, Huang says that if China became the first to commercialize GM rice and there was a slip-up in international trade, “People would lose faith in all [Chinese] commodities.”

Beijing faces a lack of confidence even at home. In a survey conducted last year by Greenpeace, 65% of consumers in Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou who were familiar with GM food preferred its conventional cousin. “Right now, I think if most people see that a plant is transgenic, they don’t like it,” says Li Huaping of South China Agricultural University. Despite China’s policy of mandatory labeling GM foods, Li says many of the transgenic papayas he helped develop go unlabeled in markets because vendors know they won’t sell as well. Nevertheless, Li is optimistic this will change: “As knowledge is spread, and people understand what transgenic means, I think more people will like it.”

To be sure, all of China’s R&D won’t lie fallow forever. If Clive James is right, the Decade of Asia is coming. If a serious virus were to threaten China’s crucial domestic rice supply, or if a well-positioned politician decided transgenic maize was the answer to soaring global food prices, Beijing’s green light could come quickly. And the world would have to be ready to go.

Source:
Time
By Krista Mahr
Feb. 18, 2008

California State Assembly Approves GMO Bill

AB 541, which could become California’s first state law protecting farmers from the hazards of genetically engineered crops, passed out of the full Assembly on January 29 with a vote of 49-12. It has the support of the California Farm Bureau as well as California Certified Organic Farmers, Community Alliance with Family Farmers, the National Farmers Union and many food safety and environmental organizations.

Introduced by Assembly Member Jared Huffman (6th AD) early in 2007, the bill was held over in the Agriculture Committee in April. Since then, AB 541 has been scaled back to address two provisions related to farmer protections.

AB 541 will enact protections for California farmers against frivolous lawsuits that intimidate and harass those who have not been able to prevent the inevitable – the drift of genetically engineered pollen or seed. It will level the playing field for farmers accused by agricultural biotechnology companies and other patent holders of contract violations, and discourage the practice of biotech companies sampling crops without explicit permission from farmers and prosecuting based on unverifiable testing results.

Specifically, the newly amended bill would provide for:

* Protection from patent infringement lawsuits for farmers unknowingly contaminated by GE crops. Currently, farmers with crops that become contaminated by patented seeds or pollen have been the target of such lawsuits without clear recourse or*
The establishment of a mandatory crop sampling protocol to be used by patent holders when investigating farmers they believe may have violated patents or seed contracts. This protocol would require the farmer’s written permission for sampling, and provide for a state agriculture official to accompany the patent holder during the sampling and collect duplicate samples for independent verification if requested by either party.

“I am very pleased that the stakeholders on this issue have found a way to address one of the issues related to genetic contamination of crops,” says Assembly Member Huffman. “While there is still work to do on other issues concerning genetically engineered food, AB 541 would be an important step in establishing basic protections for California’s farmers.”

The original bill included several other elements, including the establishment of the country’s first system of notification for the locations of GE crops; the confinement of experimental pharmaceutical-producing crops to greenhouses to protect the food system from contamination; and, legislative clarity that the GE crop manufacturer is liable in the event of contamination, and not farmers.

“While AB 541 as currently amended represents only a small piece of what our stakeholders identify as issues to be addressed, we think this represents a move in the right direction,” says Renata Brillinger, director of the Genetic Engineering Policy Project, the 13-member coalition of organic and conventional farmers, food industry, environmental, and faith organizations sponsoring AB 541.

The bill will now move to the Senate for consideration.

GM wheat start-up secures venture capital in Perth (Australia)

Perth-based biotechnology company, NemGenix Pty Ltd, has secured a $500,000 investment from the Murdoch Westscheme Enterprise Partnership fund, which supports projects arising from the university.

The investment was endorsed by MWEP advisor and Perth-based venture capital fund manager Stone Ridge Ventures.

NemGenix is currently undertaking a programme to develop genetically modified wheat with work to commence on sugarcane and barley later this year.

NemGenix’s chief executive Dr Sean Hird said with climate change and a growing world population, there was now acceptance that GM crop development will play a pivotal role in increasing global food production.

“NemGenix, as Western Australia’s only GM crop development company, is well placed to take advantage of this market opportunity,” he said.

“We are delighted with the investment, and the endorsement of SRV. With the $320,000 grant from the Federal Government’s Department of Education, Science and Technology, announced last month, and with other funding lined-up, we are now financially secure for the next 2 years.”

Commenting on the investment, SRV stated, “we were impressed by the strength of the management team and their focussed business plan which is underpinned by world-class technology licensed from CSIRO”.

U.S. Wheat Customers Are Hearing About Transgenic Wheat

USW is working in cooperation with the National Association of Wheat Growers through a Joint Biotechnology Committee to develop the potential for transgenic wheat production in the U.S. As part of that cooperative endeavor, USW is ramping up efforts to help our international customers understand that transgenic wheat is on its way to market – and why. In the last six months, USW has made a presentation called “Transgenic Wheat – Outlook for the Future” to hundreds of private and public wheat buyers, millers, processors and government officials at public meetings in more than 20 countries, including Asian and European nations where public resistance to genetically modified food remains strong.

“The presentation helps customers understand that transgenic crop production is expanding rapidly around the world,” says USW’s John Oades, Vice President and Director West Coast Office, who prepared the message and has delivered it several times. “More than 250 million acres of transgenic crops are being grown in 22 countries on six continents.

“At the same time, world wheat harvested area continues to decline,” he notes. “Yes, traditional breeding has increased yields and the world produces more wheat every year, but wheat consumption has exceeded production in eight of the last ten years. The simple fact is that wheat acres are being replaced by crops that offer more profit to producers, often because of their transgenic traits.”

USW is making the point that something has to change to make wheat more competitive – and one of the leading options is transgenic technology.

“Ultimately, transgenic wheat must deliver benefits to everyone in the supply chain and customers must be able to choose between transgenic and non-transgenic wheat,” Oades says. “Everyone involved in its development must be able to clearly demonstrate those benefits to buyers, processors and consumers at home and around the world. Before that happens, we all have to work toward science-based standards for acceptable tolerances for incidental or trace amounts of biotechnology-enhanced events in raw and processed grains and oilseeds, as well as food and feed.”

To learn more about industry positions on transgenic wheat, visit the Web at http://www.uswheat.org, http://www.wheatworld.org
or
http://www.growersforbiotechnology.org.

Source: US Wheat Export Letter
2/1/2008