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BC THE ORGANIC WAY by Marya Skrypiczajko
A few evenings ago I had the good fortune of listening to Percy Schmeiser, the Saskatchewan farmer who for the last eight years has been pulled under the corporate combine called Monsanto, speak to a large public group in Nelson. He told his story of being unjustly sued by Monsanto and presented a lecture on the reality of GMOs in Canada and the corporate push by the big biotech companies to take over Canadian agriculture. I had admired him before, but now after spending an evening listening to this energetic 74-year-old man speak and realizing that rather than enjoy retirement he chooses to travel worldwide to lecture and lobby government groups, I am even more impressed and inspired.
One subject he spoke of is the current push by the big, bad biotech companies to have the laws guarding Canada’s seed system to be changed in such a way that farmers would lose many of their inherent rights regarding seed use and have those rights turned over to large corporations.
The Canadian Seed Growers Association; the Canadian Seed Trade Association, including Monsanto and Syngenta; the Canadian Seed Institute and the Grain Growers of Canada have bound together to pressure the Canadian government to accept the proposals of the seed sector review (SSR) that essentially discourages Canadian farmers from saving, reusing and selling their own seed while restructuring Canada’s plant breeding system to give large companies more regulatory flexibility and more profits.
The nitty gritty of their proposal is such:
·To charge farmers royalties for saving their own seed that would in turn be paid to the seed companies.
·To force farmers into buying “certified” seed from big companies by linking the use of such seed to crop insurance premiums. (Certified seed itself is a problem as recent studies have found a majority of canola for instance to be contaminated with transgenics.) Farmers using their own seed would pay more insurance or maybe not even be eligible for insurance.
·To put an end to farmers’ rights to buy and sell their own common seed by requiring all seed sold to have a varietal name. For farmers who sell common seed this would mean field inspections, documentation, etc., all of which would make common seed too expensive.
·To drop the merit criteria for new seeds introduced into the market. This would mean crops don’t have to perform well in regards to yield, disease resistance or efficient use of the soil in which they are grown.
·To extend the plant breeders’ protection and royalty periods from 15 to 20 years.
·To ease the way for more unlabelled GMOs in the marketplace.
Until the mid 1990s, farmers and government-funded universities and labs developed seed to best suit Canada’s diverse climatic and soil conditions. This public system was successful because it was in the interests of farmers and the public and because it enabled a free exchange of information for all groups involved in seed development.
Since then, the industry has been taken over by four very large seed companies; Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer and Dupont now control the market. Just one of the problems with private sector breeding is that the companies are not developing strains of seed that best suit farmers’ needs. For these private companies reporting to their shareholders (as opposed to Canadian farmers and food consumers) it is not a financially efficient business for them to develop different strains of crops for Canada’s different agricultural areas, and nor is it in their interest to do so.
It is clear that farmers need the old system to be efficient and to be free to go about their work. And we as consumers need it too. If the SSR is successful, these big multinational corporations will control the Canadian seed industry, which in essence is agriculture. There will be fewer varieties of foods for us to choose from and sooner than we know it more GMOs will be growing wild in Canada and for sale on the shelves of our grocery stores.
Comment period about the SSR is continuing until March 8, 2005. If you oppose its proposals, you can write to your MP or our PM and let them know. According to Percy Schmeiser, who himself was an MLA in Saskatchewan, hand written letters received by the government are taken most seriously when they are in the hundreds. Go ahead and paraphrase this article or check out the National Farmers’ Union’s website www.nfu.org if you’d like to learn more. Letters to MPs can be sent without a stamp to: House of Commons, Parliament Buildings, Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0A6
Marya Skrypiczajko is the author of BC the Organic Way – Where to Find Organic Food in British Columbia
www.bctheorganicway.com
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