Does Canada Need Bill C-474? – Interview With MP Alex Atamanenko, NDP

[shaney]

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[ward.toma]

Below is the actual Bill:


An Act respecting the Seeds Regulations
(analysis of potential harm)

Her Majesty, by and with the advice and
consent of the Senate and House of
Commons of Canada, enacts as follows:

Short title

1. This Act may be cited as the Seeds
Regulations Act.


Amendment of regulations

2. The Governor in Council shall, within
60 days after this Act comes into force,
amend the Seeds Regulations to require
that an analysis of potential harm to
export markets be conducted before the
sale of any new genetically engineered
seed is permitted.

[shaney]

Ward you have exposed exactly, one of the issues with the bill. It is one sentence and very generic. I believe it is written this way to result in shutting down the adoption and advancement of any traits going forward. This is hurting farmers not protecting them as Mr. Atamanenko claims.

[wd9]

What ever became of RIONAP?

[TOM4CWB]

Question:

Who should pay...? EG: When flax growers and industry have real costs and problems that had nothing to do with them...

(they were blind sided with no reasonable prevention solutions possible to the flax gm event)

Who should be required to make them whole (PAY the costs) caused by the release of a GM Event gone wrong?

I see no responsible entity comming forward in the gm flax event fiasco!

Banks must hold reserves for bad times.... what about the biotech industry?

[shaney]

Very good questions and points Tom. Thsi bill does not fix what happened in the Triffid flax scenario. Triffid was never commercialized and was not the property of any biotech company.

To prove how crazy this bill is, the flax growers are not supporting it from what I have been told.

[charliep]

Just curious if anyone has defined what market acceptance is? Is
it something that can be measured? Who determines what the
standard is?

The reason I ask is because you pressured at several time on the
alfalfa issue which seemed to be the driver but no real definition
on damage other than loss of markets/don't worry about existing
biotech crops. Also see the reference to organic with the note
that this market will obviously have different standards than other
markets.

Perhaps a more measurable process would be to ensure
developers of new biotech products make sure they have their
genetic events registered in major markets in nothing else to
ensure it doesn't impact adventitious presence rules (inclusion in
dockage). If this step had been taken with Triffid flaxseed, it
wouldn't be an issue today. In all fairness, who would have
guessed in the early 2000's that a genetic event can be tested at
the 1 in a 10,000 seed basis and even more. This will be an issue
for ever as ability to test improves.

[TOM4CWB]

Charlie,

The report CDC Saskatoon gave the seed industry was that background levels of one or two gm events per MILLION seeds were present in flax breeder seed they produced.

It takes multiple tests on the same seed lot to find this kind of background level of gm contamination.

9 tests negative and one test 'trace' on the tenth sample will give this type of result of the flax gm event.

The EU don't care... they have this testing down to a science and do not care if it is one seed in a billion. ZERO is ZERO.

I read rice from the US is finally being cleared for going into the EU after many years of concentrated clean up to rid themselves of the rogue rice gm event that plagued the US rice industry. The developer is paying the US farmers damages. Why shouldn't CDC Saskatoon pay for the gm flax fiasco since they distributed it in the breeder seed???

Background:

Bayer Jury Picked for Genetically Modified Rice Trial
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
By Andrew M. Harris


Bayer CropScience AG’s first trial defending claims by farmers that genetically modified rice seeds created by the company to resist herbicide damaged their crops is set to start in a federal courtroom in St. Louis.


A lawyer for the company and attorneys representing two of the Missouri farmers who sued it are to make opening statements tomorrow to a nine-person jury selected today.

Bayer AG, based in Leverkusen, Germany, and its CropScience unit face suits from more than 1,000 farmers based in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas and Missouri, which were consolidated before U.S. District Judge Catherine Perry for pretrial proceedings.

“You have to follow the law whether you agree with it or not,” Perry told prospective jurors at the outset of about four hours of lawyers’ questions and challenges. The verdict must be unanimous.

Perry is presiding over so-called bellwether trials that may guide both sides in talks over out-of-court settlements. A second such trial is to start in January, involving farmers from Arkansas and Mississippi.

Growers Ken Bell and Johnny Hunter, who operate separate southeastern Missouri farming businesses, claim the export market for their crops was curtailed when the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2006 announced that trace amounts of Bayer’s genetically modified rice had been found in U.S. long-grain stocks.

Tests by University

Bayer and Louisiana State University had been testing the rice strain for resistance to the company’s Liberty herbicide.

Bayer says its CropScience unit acted responsibly and that the LibertyLink strain was safe. The USDA deregulated one of the two grains implicated in the lawsuits in November 2006, approving it for human consumption, the company has said. The strain has never been commercially marketed.

Within four days of the USDA announcement, a decline in rice futures cost U.S. growers about $150 million, according to a consolidated complaint filed by the farmers. News of that contamination had caused futures prices to fall approximately 14 percent.

Exports also fell, the growers said, as the European Union, Japan, Russia and other overseas markets slowed for testing or stopped their imports of the U.S.-grown long grain rice.

Perry in August 2008 rejected the farmers’ bid to proceed as a single injured class, subdivided by state, finding there were too many ways for them to market their crops, meaning they weren’t all injured in the same manner.

Plaintiffs’ lawyer Grant Davis today asked the 32 prospective jurors if they would feel comfortable awarding millions of dollars in damages to Bell and Hunter, if they simply found it was more likely than not that Bayer was responsible for the damage to their crops.

One would-be juror, a woman, said she believed proof would have to be “without a shadow of a doubt for that much money.”

Another prospective juror, a U.S. Navy veteran also said he’d “have to really know” the company was responsible before returning a large damage award, prompting plaintiffs’ lawyer Grant Davis to try to illustrate his point using the city’s National Football League franchise.

“If the Rams win the Super Bowl 7-6, do they still win the world championship?” Davis asked about the team, which has won just one of eight games in 2009.

“Not this year,” the juror replied.

Neither the man nor the woman were selected for the panel that will hear the case.

Lead defense lawyer Mark Ferguson also canvassed the jurors, seeking those who had ties to the biology, bio-sciences and commodities industries. He found nobody.

Several jurors told the court they’d studied economics and accounting. One of those who did was chosen for the final group of nine, comprised of four men and five women.

Ferguson, a partner in the Chicago-based law firm Bartlit Beck Herman Palenchar & Scott LLP, will deliver Bayer’s opening statement. Davis and co-counsel Don Downing will speak first for their farmer clients, Bell and Hunter.

The case is In Re Genetically Modified Rice Litigation, 06- md-1811, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Missouri (St. Louis).

To contact the reporter on this story: Andrew M. Harris in federal court in St. Louis at aharris16@bloomberg.net.

(c) 2009 Bloomberg L.P. All Rights Reserved.

Source: Bloomberg.com

[TOM4CWB]

Perhaps if we had

Property Rights in Canada...

less protections would be needed!

[rbrunel]

the odd thing is on the adventitious presence issue is here in canada we have the same standards as the eu..zero % tolerence.....hmmmm maybe we need to look at our own rules too.
I totally agree that someone should be accountable for what they develope...toyota keeps dealing with there "recalls" If it shows up like the flac issue and no one was allowed to buy it and its everywhere at a low level the people who screwed up should pay...cdc..hmmmm do the feds have to pay this one?

[charliep]

Just curious what would have done differently in bill c-474 had been
in place in the late 1990's/early 2000's. The bill is open to
interpretation and doesn't deal with issues of liability from what I
can see.

Regardless of what Canadian law says, the Europeans require their
own scientific analysis under the EFSA and the political of having
overall EU approval and that of individual states. EU does allow GE
grains/products - you just have to follow the rules including the
political elements of the approval process.

[mcfarms]

Ton you;re dead on to the root of many issues, lack of property rights in Canada.

[shaney]

I have heard from many different people that bill 474 would of never prevented the triffid flax issue because the variety was never commercialized.

As shown in one of the earlier posts above, the bill is a one sentence bill that is about preventing biotech crops from being commercialized. Its is being pushed by the organic growers and alfalfa seed growers.

The push needs to be towards developing a global LLP policy instead of focusing on numbers like zero or 100.

[wd9]

But what happened to RIONAP?

[charliep]