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Seeds of Doubt in Canada Monsanto, the biotech giant, is suing a Canadian farmer for "illegally" growing its GM oilseed rape. But picking on Percy Schmeiser was a very public mistake By Mary Ambrose Sixty-eight-year-old Canadian Farmer Percy Schmeiser was considering retiring last year, until he was slapped with a lawsuit from Monsanto. The charge was that he had grown its genetically modified oilseed rape. Having grown oilseed rape "every year for 40 years", he had known something was amiss. He used to spray herbicide around the electricity poles at the edge of his farm. Later, he found oilseed rape growing there. The plants from his own seeds had died; these had withstood the herbicide. And Monsanto's rape had been designed to do exactly that. Schmeiser realised that among the seeds he'd collected from his previous crop were some GM seeds. By planting them, he'd unknowingly contaminated his own crop, and if GM plants were on the edges of his field, it was likely they were in the middle of it, too. It was impossible to determine the extent of the contamination, especially on a farm the size of Schmeiser s in Saskatchewan, which is 1,400 acres - as much as seven average English farms combined. As with most prairie, single-crop farms, the land is not all apiece, so he has many neighbours, some of whom have grown GM oilseed rape: and more than one road running through his land has transported it. But Monsanto's lawyers weren't interested in how the seeds arrived on Schmeiser's farm. They told him he was being sued for using Monsanto's seeds without paying for them. Schmeiser was dumbfounded and outraged. If anyone had asked him about it, he says he would have shown them where he found the GM plants and discussed it with them. He'd never bought any GM seeds. He'd never gone to the meetings Monsanto held for farmers throughout the area, where it has extolled their benefits, and had no idea that finding GM oilseed rape on his farm made him in any way liable. Monsanto's lawsuit concerns patent infringement. The company is seeking profits from Schmeiser's farm which his lawyer understands to mean profits from his 1998 crop. Monsanto is seeking the return of "all seeds or crop" containing the patented genes, and punitive damages for illegally obtaining the seeds, plus the company's court costs. It is impossible to separate a few plants out of an acre of oilseed rape, and Schmeiser believes that the GM oilseed rape is on every part of his huge farm. So the biotech company may he asking for his entire yield. "That's what's really frightening," says Schmeiser. "How can somebody put anything on someone else's land, then say it's theirs and 'We'll take it, we'll sue him, we'll fine him'." Monsanto may have sounded a warning bell to other farmers, but Schmeiser calls it "a patent entrapment". It was the first time Monsanto had sued a Canadian farmer and, in the slim frame of Percy Schmeiser, Monsanto made a dangerous enemy. Schmeiser is no country yokel, easily bamboozled and intimidated. He had been the mayor of the nearby town of Bruno for many years. He's been a member of the provincial parliament. He wants his children, the fourth generation of Schmeisers, to work the farm, to inherit it, as he did. And he insists that he didn't watch his grandparents clear the land and build a farm just "to have the profits taken over by a big multinational". With help from his brother, a well- respected constitutional lawyer, Schmeiser countersued, alleging that Monsanto had defamed his character. Monsanto did not put a dollar figure on its suit. Schmeiser did. He's suing for C$10m (£4.2m) in punitive damages for the "arrogant, high- handed and shocking conduct" of Monsanto. The suit cites the company's "callous disregard for the environment" by introducing GM oilseed rape into his community, defamation of his character, money lost through being forced to change his farming practices, and the cost of clearing his farm of GMOs. Mediation efforts have collapsed, and the case is expected to come to trial next summer. But Schmeiser thinks that Monsanto will try to settle rather than submit to the further publicity of a trial. As manager of a large farm- machinery dealership. Schmeiser knows "thousands of farmers", and he believes he's being made an example of because other farmers have found unwanted GM seeds GMon their farms. "We have been told by the National Farmers' Union that there are dozens of Percy Schmeisers out there receiving threatening letters," says Jennifer Story of the Council of Canadians, a watchdog group. The unwanted seeds, Schmeiser suspects, blew in from a neighbour, who, in 1996, had planted the then new GM oilseed rape so close to Schmeiser that there wasn't "even a fence line in between". It's also not unusual for farmers to transport oilseed rape uncovered. Schmeiser says a scientist who worked with Monsanto had assured farmers that, if its oilseed rape seed flew out of a truck, it couldn't travel very far. "I wonder if he's ever been in a snowstorm or a sandstorm," muses Schmeiser. "There's wind on the ground, too, and it'll spread." Schmeiser believes that another farmer told Monsanto about seeing its oilseed rape on his land, where it had survived herbicide spraying. Indeed, Monsanto, by its own admission, has received many calls from farmers. Monsanto vice-president Ray Mowling told CBC Radio, in an interview quoted in Schmeiser's suit, that the company had received about 30 tips from farmers about its oilseed rape being planted without permission. (Despite repeated efforts, no one at Monsanto Canada agreed to speak to 'the business'.) "They're pitting farmer against farmer and destroying our social fabric," says Schmeiser. Whatever lesson (not to mention money) Monsanto might have hoped for by suing Schmeiser has been lost in lawyers' fees and bad public relations. Schmeiser himself has become a cause celebre in north America, and was recently filmed by French television. He keeps up a constant campaign, recently writing to MPs asking how a company could actually "own" a plant, even if its gene was in it. But, while Schmeiser may not have wanted Monsanto's crop, many other farmers did. About 60 per cent of the oilseed rape grown in the Canadian west is GM. Many farmers embraced it to increase their margins. For many, the past few years have been disastrous. The drought on the prairies has been worse than in the depression of the 1930s. The low price of oilseed rape has been compounded by a much lower level of government subsidy (9 cents per acre, per year) than American (38 cents) or European farmers (56 cents) get. And there is very little emergency money from the government available for farmers when they are up against it. This means that bigger farms can hold out longer against Monsanto's blandishments. But for small farms, running on small margins - as Corey Oilikka, president of the Canadian National Farmers' Union, says: "Anything can make the difference." Many farmers have happily chosen a crop guaranteeing a higher yield and requiring less herbicide. (Monsanto says 20,000 Canadian farmers grow its products. Schmeiser says that's a figure from the first year of GM- production, and it has since dropped considerably.) "Cleaner fields, higher yields", was the promise. What no one predicted was that the rest of the world might not want GM- altered rape. Given that Canadian farmers' crops make up 80 per cent of the world's oilseed rape, this was a serious blow. In less than eight months, the price of oilseed rape has dropped by C$4 a bushel from an average of C$9 a bushel. Oilikka says: "Farmers are beginning to question the profit-making potential that's shutting them out of markets." When a big American rape exporter asked farmers to segregate their non-GM crops, it was shocked. More than half the soybean and 75 per cent of the corn in the US is GM. It could be argued that farmers knew the risks when they chose to grow GM crops. Perhaps they should have asked more critical questions. Even if farmers grow their GM crop separately from the non-GM, they cannot guarantee, or even label, any of their oilseed rape as GM-free. They didn't think they would ever need to separate it. The growers were confident that the Canadian government's endorsement meant the crop was safe for human consumption. But Jennifer Story points out that since Monsanto won't make its data available, the Canadian public "can't have access to the information that was used to make the decision on whether the food was safe." Story feels that some consumers are also reluctant to demand more information in case they're construed as criticising farmers. Now some farmers are stuck with a crop which, says Schmeiser, takes from five to 10 times the normal amount of herbicide to kill. He says prairie farmers are calling it "a new noxious weed". The farmers' love affair with GM crops is understandable. As in Britain, the biotechnology industry has been welcomed by Canada's government, initially as an environmental saviour. Even the most anti-GM food protester admits that they've conducted interesting research into "bio- remediation" - growing organisms which could help reclaim toxic sites, developing plants for growth in abandoned mine sites, and organisms which eat spilt oil. The biotech business is also involved in exciting pharmaceutical work. Food, originally, was only a small part of the business. But not for long. The Candian biotech industry has grown to 500 companies, 25,000 employees and an C$800m revenue, a third of which is in agriculture. The government sees it as a source of high-tech jobs and research, and has backed its support with money. The exact extent of the financial support to the industry is hard to calculate but, according to Statistics Canada - the government statistics bureau - biotechnology receives C$314m annually from the federal government. In 1997-1998, it reported that "virtually all (99 per cent) of the biotech expenditure was devoted to research and development". Friends of the Earth (FoE) wants the government to give the organic- farming movement C$17m, arguing that it has stacked the deck by financing only one part of the agriculture industry and limiting the consumer's choice. Giving consumers a choice is the one modest goal to which all the environmental groups in Canada aspire. They want the estimated 60 per cent of food containing GM products which is available on Canadian grocery shelves to be labelled as such. They hope this will spark at least public awareness, and at best concern. At the moment, there is little demand for non-GM produce - if supermarkets are anything to go by. Organic produce is rarely available; Canadians tend to trust the government to look alter their health. They have not had the BSE crisis which led many Britons to conclude that their government had misled them about what was safe to eat. "If this were 10 years ago, before the BSE crisis," Pete Reilly of FoE UK admits, "there would have been a stampede" to get into growing GM crops. In an effort to calm public health concerns, Tony Blair has extended the moratorium on growing GM crops from one year to three. But will the current crop trials put fears to rest? According to many scientists, they shouldn't. The trials are testing for the impact GM crops could have on the bio-diversity of the British landscape. But one fence has already been cleared. In the UK, GM foods have been passed as safe to eat by the advisory committee on novel foods and processes, which reports to the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. This is what concerns toxicologists, such as Vyvyan Howard, a lecturer in foetal and infant toxico- pathology at the University of Liverpool. Howard believes that the testing of GM food's safety has been woefully inadequate, and crop trials aren't the complete answer. He says: "There is very much more they could do in the laboratory than is being done." The American US Food and Drug Administration may have deemed GM foods safe, but it recently leaked documents showing that some scientists were concerned they were approved too rapidly. As Howard points out, the FDA "does no follow-up tests", and is currently being sued by the American Centre for Food Safety. Philip Regal, ecology professor at the University of Minnesota, was quoted in Canadian Business magazine as saying that the US government found it too hard to test genetically-modified organisms and "just gave up", characterising the approach as one of "if the people want progress, they're going to have to be guinea pigs." The long-established and rigorous procedures for testing drugs are, to Howard's mind, the way in which GM foods should be tested. "The only way that you can test for human allergy is to have human-feeding trials. That is what you do with pharmaceuticals." He says that we should err on the side of caution, as once these plants are released, there is no turning back. 'What we're worried about is subtle, long-term, low-dose toxicology. Because what we see in the [biotech industry and government] plan is to change every single staple in the human food chain - soya, cereals, potatoes." Or, as Schmeiser puts it, Monsanto wants "control of the seed supply which would give them complete control of the food supply". Howard believes that too much of the government's confidence is based on "risk assessment". "Too many decision-makers see it as the same thing as hazard assessment. But it's not necessarily based on science. It's opinion - usually from the industry." He compares it to the archaic system of food-tasting. When the food taster keels over after eating, you draw your own conclusion about the safety of the food. A GM food taster would, for Howard, be a "direct hazard assessment of biological systems". His worries carry weight because there are so few truly independent scientists testing CM products. Most of the government's conclusions in Canada are based on the industry's own research. The current UK trials are being conducted by the government, but all subsequent tests are to he carried out by GM-food manufacturers, and then checked by the government. Each crop trial costs at least £1. 1m which is one reason the government will now be relying on industry data. On October 18, more than 200 scientists working in the area of food health for the Canadian government signed a petition to the minister of health saying their inability to test products for themselves put the health of Canadians at risk. Days later, the award-winning science broadcaster and geneticist, David Suzuki, said in a speech that eating GM foods is "a massive experiment", the results of which will not be known "until millions of people have been exposed to these foods for decades". The testing of these plants may be open to criticism, but the government warns environmental groups that the more they continue to rip up trial crops of GM products, the less Britain will have to add to the EU debate, one way or the other, about the future of these products. Yet when the advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment, which is conducting the crop trials, declares that if ,"in the unlikely event", pollen from GM crops travelled into a non-GM crop of the same plant, the risk to human health and the environment is "none", one wonders how it can be so sure. The committee uses isolation distances of 200m, as agreed by Scimac, the umbrella group monitoring the trials of GM foods, which includes both farmers and : industry. In oilseed rape, it asserts, this guarantees seed purity "in excess of 99 per cent'. But tell that to Percy Schmeiser. "It's pretty windy here in the prairies," he says, drily. Brewster Kneen, a sheep farmer for 15 years, with degrees in economics and divinity, is the author of 'Famaggeddon: Food and the Culture of Biotechnology'. He sees the move towards acting first and responding to the fall-out later as "the arrogant pride that dominates the biotech industry - that 'Oh, we know what we're doing, and if we make a mistake we'll correct it with another technology'." British environmentalists hope that, even if the biotech-agriculture industry clears the few hurdles left in the UK, GM food will not necessarily succeed. According to MORI, health tops the list of most shoppers' concerns; hence Salisbury's description of organic produce "as the fastest-growing sector in British supermarkets". Worth £340m last year, it is expected to rise still further. In Canada, government scientists and Monsanto stress that they have tested GM foods under international standards, using the best science available. But are we asking the right questions? wonders Sheila Forsyth, a biologist and agricultural food scientist who worked on the guidelines: "We have to develop regulations along with the science." And Pete Reilly, of FoE, says that "if a big farmer like Percy has problems, you can bet a farmer in Norfolk is facing trouble." So what price the possibility of keeping any farms GM- free? Percy Schmeiser is gloomy. "If one farmer gets it in Europe, in just a matter of years, there'll be nobody who won't have contaminated crops - whether they like it or not". [Box: Percy Schmeiser's law suit has made him a star of the air-waves in north America and he appears on TV and radio programmes. He even has a website dedicated to him, www.fightfrankenfood.com though he admits he's never seen it) - " don't even have a computer" he says] [Source: the business Financial Times weekend magazine 04.12.99, posted to the <GE@naturallaw.org.nz> list on 3 Jan 2000] ** This material is distributed for research and educational purposes only. ** Feedback to: <welcome@ecoglobe.org.nz>

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3 January ecoglobe news 2000

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