Last week's decision by Premier Gallop to declare the entire State of Western Australia a "GM-free area" is likely to come back and haunt the government. The purported concern for WA's "clean green status" will eventually be exposed as populism playing to prejudice and ignorance.
WA canola growers are now well and truly restricted to the continued production of triazine-tolerant (TT) canola. This variety, however, is not "clean and green" but rather its production is dependent on atrazine, a herbicide being phased out in Europe on the basis it poses an unacceptable environmental risk.
The WA Department of Agriculture acknowledges that dependence on atrazine is a problem because of concerns over groundwater contamination.
The reality is that GM crops are cleaner and greener than conventional varieties and in the case of canola give a 20-40 per cent higher yield.
Canada started growing GM canola in 1995 and is now the major world exporter with Japan and China major markets. GM cotton has also been an impressive success now grown on 90 per cent of cotton farms in NSW and Queensland with the latest varieties reducing pesticide use by 75 per cent.
GM cotton is a competitor to canola as 35 per cent of the vegetable oil consumed in Australia is from cotton seed.
Interestingly, the first plantings of GM cotton in 1996 passed without much notice as it predated the Australian launch of the anti-GM Greenpeace campaign and the formation of the "Network of Concerned Farmers".
The anti-GM campaigners now conveniently ignore cotton as an important source of vegetable oil and wrongly promoting GM canola as the first GM food crop. The cotton industry, 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 it has brought the industry.
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. It should not be 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.
The announcement by Premier Gallop was reported nationally as the NSW and Victorian governments considered applications for large scale commercial field trials of GM canola.
Following the decision of the Federal Government's Gene Technology Regulator last year that GM canola is just as safe for human health and for the environment as conventional canola, the response of the Victorian government was not to welcome a cleaner and greener alternative for the state's farmers but to slap a one year moratorium on GM canola. At the same time the Victorian government commissioned two reports supposedly to consider market implications.
Both reports were released last week and both concluded: GM products are being traded on the world market; GM producing countries dominate the world grain trade; there is little or no evidence of any market access problems; 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 own Department of Agriculture.
Yet incredibly, the Victorian Premier, claiming market access issues, decided just last Thursday to extend by 4 years the moratorium on GM crops and not give the go-ahead for the field trials.
His excuse is in direct contradiction of the findings of the two reports he had commissioned. Interestingly, while Premier Bracks claimed the local dairy industry supported the ban on GM canola, one of the reports explains that the Victorian dairy industry currently imports significant quantities of GM soybean meal to feed its cows.
NSW has a current three year moratorium but is yet to make decisions regarding the large scale field trials of GM canola. South Australia and Tasmania also have moratoriums.
In their recent announcements, both the WA and Victorian Premiers have played up the "clean green" concept while ignoring issues associated with the herbicide atrazine. A much higher proportion of WA canola growers, approximately 90 per cent, plant TT canola so the issue is much more important in WA.
Two major problems loom. The WA canola industry could find itself stranded if the herbicide atrazine is eventually banned in Australia. Perhaps of more concern, however, is the issue of market access as raised by Graeme O'Neill in the latest issue of the biotechnology magazine Agbiotech.
O'Neill suggested that a logical extension of the European ban on atrazine is that Europe will refuse to import canola grown with the herbicide. If Japan were to follow the European ban on triazine herbicides, WA could lose its most lucrative canola market. Ironically Japan and the European Union both now accept GM oilseed imports.
Australia has been a secular, rational nation with efficient agricultural industries able to develop and adopt state-of-the-art technology. On the basis of quasi-religious belief and prejudice, however, State Governments are now imposing bans on a technology that promises improved yields while reducing environmental impacts.
At risk is our international competitiveness and an opportunity to use genuinely cleaner and greener technology.
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