Not so sweet

To anyone who's been watching the GM sugar beet issue, it's perhaps not surprising to see Monsanto being just the tiniest bit manipulative in the media. If the genetically modified sugarbeet they hustled onto the market without doing their environmental impact study is banned, they argue, your sugar prices will rise.

So whose fault would a rise in sugar prices be then, the farmers who planted the beets at Monsanto's promise it would make their lives easier, their yields higher and their profits better? The consumer, who has no say? The sugar companies who, for reasons we can only guess at, insisted farmers plant GM sugar beets? The multinational who stands to make a lot of money from the exercise?

The arguments against genetically modified sugar beets are pretty standard: if you allow sugar beets to be planted, as Alberta currently does (for Rogers Sugar/Lantic) as did the US sugar beet industry, then you risk cross-contamination of sugar beet's plant relatives, through cross-pollination. These relatives include table beets and chard, and that puts at risk the crops of farmers who wish to grow them as conventional or organic crops.

Another reason for opposing GM sugar beets is their herbicide resistance, which means there is a potential for increased use of herbicides. Increased use of herbicides leads to increases in herbicide-resistant weeds, which leads to even more use of herbicides. And round and round. Since Monsanto sells both the seed and the herbicide, it is in their economic interest to sell plenty of both. Given the profits it stands to make by selling its herbicides, should we accept the company's assurances that no harm will come from the residues of their product that ends up on our food, our farmland and in our water supply?

And finally, consumers who simply do not wish to consume genetically modifed foods are once again being sold a food product that doesn't have to be labelled - so they have no real choice in the matter - and whose health risks over the long term are simply not known. We've been told that if we wish to avoid GMO products, we need only buy certified organic. But products like these are simply slipped into the food chain without public warning. And if consumers don't know in the first place that their sugar is suddenly now made from genetically modified ingredients, how would they know to switch to organic?

GM day - hello US GM beet ban - goodbye organic corn?

Excellent news this morning about sugar beets south of the border: a federal court ruling that the US government illegally approved genetically modified sugar beets, on the grounds that they cross-pollinate easily, making it impossible for those who wish to grow non-GM beets to continue doing so.

Which begs the question about the approval of SmartStax GM corn: one might question the approval of a wind-pollinated member of the grass family in countries where the only GM labelling permitted is that of its negative: certified organic food cannot contain genetically modified ingredients.

Monsanto/Dow Chemical's SmartStax GM corn was approved in the US and Canada in what I hope is record speed (I would hate to think this is the turnaround for all product approvals).

It took the EPA and the CFIA about a month to approve the stuff, from the time Monsanto submitted its documents on June 16 until the official registration July 20, which rather suggests they didn't bother overmuch with doing their own messy safety checks or independent evaluation of environmental risks, preferring to accept Monsanto's research. Is such haste normal? If it's not, it appears to mark some new dodge on Monsanto's part, that they have figured out how to outmaneuvre those pesky regulations.

Approval in Canada was announced the same day as in the US; I'm told it's normally just a matter of rubber-stamping such products once they've been approved in the US. Canada certainly hasn't demonstrated much interest in reining in the environmental or health risks of GM in the past: look at the trade pickle we ended up in recently with contaminated flax seed. Health Canada has a lovely flow chart that shows the steps required, officially, to assure our safety, but it's hard to match all these steps to the approval of SmartStax. Here's a full list of the GM products we already have on our tables here. So far, SmartStax doesn't appear on the list.

Whether our legislators will attend to US court rulings, or somehow maintain that our winds don't blow the same as theirs is another question. As is whether Canada will respect the very similar US court judgement that ruled GM alfalfa posed undue risks of cross-pollination to farmers who didn't want to grow it, resulting in a nationwide ban in the States.

Meantime, GM sugar beets have been planted in Canada for the first time this year; your sugarbowl will certainly contain some GM sugar if you buy Rogers sugar. Vote with your dollars, folks.

Valentines wishes

GE Free BC reports that our biggest sugar processing company, Rogers/Lantic, the last GM-Free sugar beet processing company in North America, is about to decide if they will accept GM sugar beet this growing season. This sugar beet has been genetically modified to resist Monsanto's herbicide Roundup. Because sugar beets are wind-pollinated, there is a huge risk of cross-pollination between GM and conventional varieties, as well as related crops such as organic chard and table beets.

And as always, of course, there's the overriding safety concern about genetically-modified plants intended for human consumption, which is that we simply don't know enough about the long-term health risks of eating such foods. To paraphrase what I heard one seed grower say about it, do we really have the right to perform this kind of science experiment on our grandchildren?

It is suggested, therefore, that you send a special valentine to Rogers/Lantic's CEO, Edward Makin, asking that he keep our sugar GE free.

Another sweet thought this week might include sending a submission to a new publication, Food & Sex (a new independent quarterly that explores the history, nature and culture of food and sex) from The Bouwerie, "a collective of visual linguists, wayfaring wordsmiths, agricultural artists, and culinary arbiters" who also bring you the very useful Eat Well Guide, a fun search tool to keep you sustainably nourished in Canada and the U.S.