Choosing GM for Breakfast

Address to the State Council Conference of the NSW Liberal Party,
Sunday Breakfast, Queanbeyan, 4 April 2004

INTRODUCTION

Some of you may already know that GM fish & chips are an Australian staple.  For those of you who don't, or who don't know how this came to be, I will let you in on the secret.

But right now we are at breakfast, and clearly there are no fish & chips (GM or conventional) available at the buffet.  So let me help you choose some other GM food for breakfast.  Before I do that, let me explain something about GM crops and GM food so we can make an informed choice.

In Australia, we enjoy a wonderful selection of cheap food.  Our agricultural industries have a long and proud history of developing state of the art technologies.  As a consequence we grow enough food for us, and a lot extra for export.  Did you know that Australian rice growers produce enough rice to feed 40 million people a meal every day of the year?

Few Australians know hunger.  Thanks to modern, mechanised, high-yielding agriculture, we have full, and for many of us, fat bellies.  Full and fat, many people now feel they can criticise farming practices from a distance.

So, what have you enjoyed so far from the buffet this morning?  How many of you had milk in your cereal or at least in your tea or coffee?

According to a report released by Victoria's Bracks government just two weeks ago, the Victorian dairy industry imports significant quantities of GM soybean meal to feed its cows.  You might be surprised that Victorian cows are fed GM food or that we import feed for dairy cows.

GM FOODS AND CROPS ARE OUT THERE

GM producing countries dominate world grain trade and account for 80 per cent of world maize exports, 70 per cent of soybeans, 50 per cent of cotton seed and 40 per cent of canola.  The percentage of the market held by GM producing countries is predicted to increase as the world area harvested to GM broad acre crops increases.  There was a 15 percent increase between 2002 and 2003.

Uptake of the technology has been rapid in North and South America, but anti-GM campaigning has slowed or blocked plantings in most of Europe, Africa and parts of Asia.

Interestingly, Europe is having second thoughts, and there are signs EU governments are trying to dig themselves out of the anti-GM hole they crawled into during the 1990s.  GM maize was recently approved for commercial planting in the UK.  The only other EU country growing GM is Spain -- it has been growing GM maize for about 5 years.

In New Zealand, anti-GM sentiment was very strong and so a confused government held a royal commission into the issue.  The commission found that GM is not inherently dangerous;  that New Zealand could not afford to ignore the potential benefits of the technology;  and recommended the lifting of the moratorium.  Field trials of the first New Zealand GM crop were recently approved -- GM herbicide tolerant onions.

Australia is interesting.  In 1988 we were the first country to release a GM organism, a successful crown gall bacterium to prevent the disease of roses, apples, pears and peaches.  Since then, we have made only one other release, GM cotton, first planted in 1996.  This has been impressively successful, grown on 90 per cent of cotton farms in NSW and Queensland, with the latest varieties reducing insecticide use by 75 per cent.  The previous GM variety reduced insecticide use by an average 56 per cent.  This meant about 2 million litres less pesticide entered the environment each year.

GM FISH & CHIPS

Few people know that about 35 per cent of Australian vegetable oil is from cotton seed.  The GM percentage of the current cotton crop is 55 per cent (the limit on proportion of crop planted to GM was previously 30 percent but this has now been increased).  Therefore, about 20 per cent of our vegetable oil is derived from genetically modified plants.

And, I don't know whether you really want to know this, but about 30 percent of each chip you eat, by weight, is oil (the oil content will vary with the cooking temperature).

Is there a problem?

Well, vegetable oil produced from GM cottonseed and canola is absolutely identical in chemical composition to non-GM oils because all the genetic material is denatured in the refining process.  These oils are thus exempt from being labeled GM.  In the same way the milk from Victoria is not labeled GM.

Premium cottonseed oil is used by many takeaways because it cooks hot and retains heat.

So, the news is that we have all been eating GM fish and chips since 1997.

Curiously, anti-GM campaigners are wrongly promoting GM canola as the first GM food crop by conveniently ignoring that cotton is an important source of vegetable oil.

The cotton industry, presumably fearing a backlash from the multinational anti-GM lobby, is saying nothing.  This is unfortunate given the popularity of GM technology with cotton farmers and the environmental and economic benefits.

GM CANOLA

In 2002, Greenpeace launched its anti-GM campaign in Australia and the "Network of Concerned Farmers" was formed.  They have mounted a formidable campaign and we now have a situation where Labor State Governments in Tasmania, SA, WA, NSW and Victoria are blocking the planting of our next potential GM crop, GM canola, on the basis it will impact on our overseas markets and our clean green image.

GM canola gives a 20-30 per cent higher yield and has been developed for the use of the environmentally softer herbicide, glyphosate.

The situation in NSW and Victoria is as follows:

Last year the Federal Government's Gene Technology Regulator determined that GM canola is just as safe for human health and the environment as conventional canola.  So the NSW and Victorian governments slapped one and three year moratoriums, respectively, on the crop to prevent commercial plantings.

At the same time the Victorian government commissioned two reports supposedly to consider market implications.  Both reports were released two weeks ago and both concluded that GM products are being traded on the world market;  that GM producing countries dominate the world grain trade;  that there is little or no evidence of any market access problems;  and that there is no premium for non-GM product.  Similar conclusions were reached in a detailed study undertaken by the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE) and this was also the finding of a 2003 report by WA's Department of Agriculture.

Yet incredibly, the Victorian Premier, claiming market access issues, decided a little over two weeks ago (25th March) to extend the moratorium for another four years and not give the go-ahead for field trials.  His excuse (market access) is in direct contradiction of the findings of the two reports he had commissioned.

Interestingly, while Premier Bracks claimed that the local dairy industry supported the ban on GM canola, one of the reports explained that the Victorian dairy industry currently imports significant quantities of GM soybean meal to feed its cows -- as I mentioned earlier in my talk.

The three-word title of an article in the Herald Sun by columnist Andrew Bolt last week seemed to sum it up well, "Safe, good, banned".

NSW is about a year into its three year moratorium.  Just last Thursday (1st April) -- exactly one week after the Victorian decision against the field trials -- the Carr government also decided against the large scale field trials and also cited marketing reasons.

NSW agricultural Minister, Ian Macdonald, said the decision to hold back on the large trials was a result of opposition from grain exporter AWB.  The Australian newspaper ran with the heading, "Wheat Board snuffs GM canola trial".

Yet 3 days earlier, on the Monday (29th March), the AWB had put out a press release clearing stating it support for the trials -- "AWB reaffirmed its support for co-existence trials for GM canola to proceed in Australia as an important step in ensuring the grains industry moves forward."

The AWB has, however, given mixed messages and in the same media release the AWB reiterated that it was against the "immediate commercial release of GM canola" citing concerns for the marketing of Australian wheat.  The AWB, with a marketing monopoly on the Australian wheat crop, apparently does not want to bother too much with GM issues at the moment.

Canada, of course, successfully markets its conventional wheat while also growing and marketing GM canola.

The NSW government did give the go ahead for a limited field trial of "no more than 420 ha (of GM canola)" purportedly to "test different varieties of GM canola plants against traditional varieties".

Graeme O'Neill, writing in the March issue of Agbiotec Reporter, suggested any large-scale trial would become a must-see attraction for canola farmers from the other states.  Farmers would see taller and more robust plants.

While perhaps not the 3,500 ha trial O'Neill and others were anticipating, the 420 ha may move the issue forward -- but at a snails pace.  We are already 8 years behind Canada.

THE TABOO FOOD

Why don't environmentalists approve of GM?  Some say because it is not "natural".  GM is about science and technology.  Then again, so much of what we use and consume is not natural and a product of science and technology.

Yet strawberry flavored lip-gloss is not being banned.  On the contrary, more women are apparently using lip-gloss, as opposed to lipstick, because it looks more "natural".

We can perhaps glean some understanding of current trends from a book, The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker.  He writes about the psychology of modern society and makes the point, "many behaviors have been amoralized, switching (in the eyes of many people) from moral flaws to lifestyle choices.  The amoralized acts include divorce, illegitimacy, working motherhood, homosexuality ... As if to compensate for all the behaviors that have been amoralized in recent decades, we are in the midst of a campaign to moralize new ones."

In Sydney last year, Greenpeace re-launched its True Food Guide.  The big names of the Australian food scene attended the launch where Margaret Fulton declared that she hoped to keep Australia free from GM food and thus our food "safe to eat for my children, grand children and great grandchildren".

Never mind that the takeaway down-the-road was probably selling fish and chips cooked in cotton seed oil.

We can respect Margaret Fulton's desire to not eat GM food -- in the same way that we respect the rights of Moslems to not eat pork -- but the anti-GM campaigners do not appear to accept other people's right to choose GM.  They have decided GM is wrong.

This moralizing comes at an economic and environmental cost -- that includes the long term competitiveness of Australian agriculture.

It is not the role of state governments in Australia to ban food crops on the basis of belief.  Yet this is fundamentally the reason farmers are being prevented from growing GM canola -- because GM food is a taboo food for the environment movement.  Indeed, environmentalism has emerged as the new religion, with multinational campaign-group Greenpeace representing the new church, complete with charity status and tax exemptions for its multi-million dollar earnings.

IN CONCLUSION

Now, you haven't all quite finished your breakfast.  But if you have, there is always the opportunity to choose a GM breakfast tomorrow ... and the next day.  When you do, remember the environmental benefits of GM including reduced use of pesticide.

So what might we chose?

I'm from Queensland and our dairy industry was the most hard-hit by deregulation, because our cows were never as efficient as those Victorian beasts.  They said it was all about Victoria having a more suitable climate.  But I'm not convinced.  It might just be the GM soybean meal Victorian farmers have been feeding their cows.

So I recommend, if you're not averse to something sweet for breakfast, and if you want to be as efficient as the Victorian dairy industry, forget the tropical fruit from Queensland, and try some cinnamon donuts made from GM soy (Yum!).

They are now available at most Safeway and Woolies supermarkets.  Be sure you are eating the real thing by checking the label, the third ingredient, in fine print should read "soy flour (GM modified)".

But you can do more.  Write to the manufacturer and ask that the donuts be cooked in premium Australian GM cotton seed oil -- at least until GM canola is available.

Thank you.