Yes, thank you.
My name is Terry Boehm, and I'm currently serving as the president of the NFU. The NFU is the largest voluntary, direct-membership farm organization in Canada, incorporated by an act of Parliament in 1969, so this makes this our fortieth anniversary.
What I'd like to talk about, of course, is to reinforce some of the things that Mr. Kuyek has spoken about. There is this model of control that's being exerted, this model that farmers are experiencing with increased seed prices and increasingly fewer options, particularly in canola, other than GM varieties, and there are mechanisms that are being exercised on them to make sure they comply totally, either through contractual arrangements, threats of legal action, or other mechanisms that keep them in line as far as buying seeds on an annual basis is concerned.
There's an assumption made about GM crops that GM is synonymous with yield increases. I'm a canola producer. I'm a conventional farmer, and I have chosen to stay outside of the GM program, particularly because of the issues that I recognized around escalating seed prices and control, etc. For example, there are very few conventional GM open-pollinated varieties left available. Most of them have unfortunately been cancelled or deregistered, and I want to address that a little bit later in what I have to say. On the varieties of non-GM canola that I'm growing, this past year I had 45 bushels per acre in Saskatchewan, which is a very good yield, and generally speaking, the varieties that I have been growing have been equivalent or even slightly better than the best hybrids out there.
It's more a function of weather conditions and conventional breeding that has brought those traits along for those varieties. In canola, for example, the GM technology has very little to do with yield and everything to do with herbicide tolerance, and that's the trait that has been emphasized in regard to that. The advances in yield and other agronomic characteristics have generally been advanced by conventional breeding programs.
Now, several problems are cropping up with GMOs--pardon the pun--in Canada, and of course GE flax is front and foremost for those of us producing flax. I had a part to play in the cancellation or deregistration of Triffid flax some eight years ago, so I'm intimately familiar with that issue. But what are we experiencing right now? We've seen one of the rare instances when farmers and industry, in all aspects, cooperated to have this variety deregistered, in spite of the fact that we had a regulatory system that allowed that variety to move through completely unimpinged by any factor, to have it removed in recognition of the market harm that would result from that coming forward. We initiated a plan to have some 180,000 bushels of certified flax seed destroyed. Unfortunately, I guess the program wasn't totally successful.
We've seen the European market close to flax, which is a premium market, which is a market that has no tolerance for this unapproved GM flax, which I might add was a completely useless product. Even prairie farmers didn't see it having any value when it was introduced. Nevertheless, our regulatory system both then and today would allow that particular variety to move through with no barriers.
How many markets can we afford to lose in this manner without recognition that there are markets in the world and that the economic well-being, both for Canadians and farmers, is hinged around a successful access to some of these markets?
One of the more interesting things is this. We've had a great deal of discussion over the years with CFIA and others about adventitious presence and the need to establish percentages in crop kinds to allow for the contamination that occurs with GM crops in the general environment.
Now we're in a situation where we have Triffid flax, the GM flax, an unapproved event in Japan. The flax industry and the canola industry, which is largely GE canola, are now worried about having GE canola markets closed in Japan because of adventitious presence contamination with unapproved GE flax and dockage.
I would say that if you accept the regulatory system as it exists, you will continue to run into these problems, because GM wheat would have proceeded through the regulatory process had not Monsanto voluntarily withdrawn it some five years ago, and we would be confronted with the same situation. Eighty-two percent of our premium market customers said they would look elsewhere for wheat supplies if Canada went down that path. GM wheat is in the offing. Some groups are lobbying for it, and indeed the industry is speaking about reviving that in a different form.
SmartStax corn is another example with which we have issues with both Health Canada and the environmental release of these products. It has six Bt traits that give it insect resistance, and two herbicide traits that allow it to be resistant to two different herbicides. Unfortunately, it hasn't really been looked at in any way that is significantly different from looking at the individual traits. The approval of individual traits normalizes it in any combination in the plants. This is actually in conflict with some of the dialogue that's in the regulations around regulating plants with normal traits, which is particularly problematic with regard to recognition elsewhere in the world. Products of GE and rDNA technology have created significant harm for many sectors, including the organic sector, which has lost many options.
Now we have a variety registration system that was modernized in June and July of this year, which has allowed the potential movement of crop kinds into less onerous merit testing requirements, agronomic testing, etc., which would allow even a quicker acceleration once those crop kinds are moved into a less onerous tier. I can assure you that industry will argue that they need the less onerous tiers in order to advance the magic bullets they have in their back pocket, and it's just too expensive to go through this testing and the recommending committees.
The CFIA actually, in their arguments for the variety registration changes, even suggested that this would allow the decision to commercialize new varieties to be made solely by the developers and not to be dependent upon a recommendation made from a recommending committee. Again environmental and market concerns go by the wayside and we run into a situation where farmers are left holding the bag.
There is a myriad of things on there. All I can say is we've ended up needing more comprehensive hearings among health, environment, and agriculture. We've ended up with expensive seeds and lost markets for farmers. How much can the Canadian economy afford going down this path?
Thank you very much.