Chew on this!

Ottawa is still pumping tax dollars into GM foods

Canadian Business 1oct01

There’s been a lot of news lately about genetically modified food and the Canadian public’s objections to it. Last month, for example, an Ipsos-Reid/Globe and Mail/CTV poll found that 63% of respondents would be less likely to buy a product if it contained GM ingredients. In the midst of the storm is biotech giant Monsanto Co., based in St. Louis, Mo. It has developed Roundup Ready wheat, a plant that has been genetically engineered to tolerate the company’s Roundup herbicide and will be ready for market sometime between 2003 and 2005.

But the glitch is that two-thirds of Canada’s $3 billion to $5 billion export wheat market—including the UK, Algeria and Japan—have said they will likely refuse to buy the product. And so far, Agriculture and Argi-Food Canada estimates that about $500,000 in tax money has been invested in the Roundup Ready wheat program through its Matching Investment Initiative Program. By the time the eight-year Monsanto project is finished in 2005, Jim Bole, director of Agriculture Canada’s cereal research centre, estimates just less than a million dollars will have been given to Monsanto.

Never mind that Monsanto Canada is a division of a US multinational with a market cap of US$8.5 billion. Why, though, when the Canadian Wheat Board’s own analysis has shown that Canadian farmers could conceivably lose hundreds of millions of dollars, would Ottawa be so generous? Bradford Duplisea of the Canadian Health Coalition, an Ottawa-based watchdog, estimates that the government has spent more than $1 billion in agricultural biotech, much of that going to controversial projects such as Monsanto’s. Between 1997 and 1998 alone, the biotech industry claimed $314 million of your tax dollars on such projects as Monsanto’s Roundup Ready canola (which has been found to have an unapproved extra gene) and Monsanto’s transgenic potatoes (which have found their way to Ukraine and Georgia in unauthorized field tests).

It’s nothing short of deplorable that there are so many incestuous ties between the food giants and the government, which not only acts as a promoter for the agri-biotech industry but also purports to be its regulator. Ottawa spent $2.8 million last spring on a door-to-door brochure extolling the virtues of GM foods. And Industry Canada, that repeated bestower of corporate welfare, is a member of BioteCanada, a lobby group for the biotech industry. Then there’s the Consumers’ Association of Canada (CAC), a group that opposes mandatory labeling of genetically modified foods while claiming independence from the industry. Duplisea obtained documents this summer that reveal that the CAC receives an unknown amount of funding from Monsanto and tens of thousands of dollars from CFIA to generate pro-biotech, anti-mandatory-labeling propaganda.

But who are we to complain?
Just lowly taxpayers.

Thanks to Norfolk Genetic Information Network (ngin), http://www.ngin.org.uk for sending this article 20sep01