Organic Farmers’ Suit Targets Monsanto, Aventis

Organic grain and oilseed farmers throughout the prairies are watching the progress of a lawsuit filed last month in Saskatchewan. The suit seeks compensation from biotech giants Monsanto and Aventis, whose genetically modified strains of canola have contaminated the crops of organic canola growers, forcing most of them to stop producing the high-value crop.

Two Saskatchewan farmers — Dale Beaudoin of Maymont and Larry Hoffman of Spalding — filed the suit against Monsanto and Aventis with assistance from the Saskatchewan Organic Directorate (SOD), an organization that represents the interests of organic producers and consumers in the province. The suit states that genetically engineered (GE) canola was introduced without a full assessment of its safety, and without hearings that could have informed the public about the risks of contaminating neighbouring crops. In fact, the suit alleges, farmers buying canola seeds from Monsanto and Aventis were told nothing about potential harm to neighbouring crops, nor were they urged to provide buffer zones between their fields and other property.

Currently, a Saskatoon judge is deciding whether to certify the farmers’ suit as a class action, a step that could result in several thousand organic producers being included in the suit as plaintiffs.

Monsanto’s Roundup Ready and Aventis’ Liberty Link canola seeds contain a gene that protects them against herbicides that are sold by these corporations. The two bioengineered varieties of canola were approved by Agriculture Canada and introduced in the mid-1990s. Since then they have been planted on hundreds of thousands of hectares on the prairies.

The problem for organic farmers is that wind and insects have carried pollen from GE fields to neighbouring farms — including many organic ones. GE canola readily crossbreeds with other types. When this occurs, the genetic makeup of the non-engineered canola plants often changes, taking on the engineered characteristics of the invading GE varieties. Contamination of non-GE canola by the GE varieties has also occurred in crop transport and storage containers.

Because GE seeds and crops are strictly prohibited in organic agriculture, hundreds of organic canola growers — including the suit’s lead plaintiffs Beaudoin and Hoffman — have stopped growing the popular oilseed. They fear their crops will inevitably be contaminated by “genetic drift,” despite their best efforts to produce crops that are free of bioengineered genes.

The SOD-supported suit also seeks an injunction to prevent Monsanto from introducing genetically engineered wheat, which sources say was grown at more than forty-five test sites throughout the prairies in 2001. Because many of these sites are Agriculture Canada research centres, there is a possibility that the federal government could be named as a defendant along with Monsanto and Aventis.

According to the SOD, Agriculture Canada’s Cereal Research Centre in Winnipeg supplied Monsanto with a hard red spring wheat that the company modified through gene splicing to produce herbicide-resistant strains of GE wheat. Monsanto is expected to seek permission to sell the resulting wheat seed to farmers as early as 2003.

Marc Loiselle — a fifth generation grain, seed and livestock farmer in Vonda, Saskatchewan — is SOD’s director of communications and research. Loiselle says the amount of damages the plaintiffs will seek is still being determined, but that “We know that organic farmers have forfeited tens of millions of dollars they could have earned from canola sales, because genetic pollution by GE canola has made it impossible for us to guarantee the genetic purity of our organic canola crops.”

The Saskatchewan Organic Directorate has set up the Organic Agriculture Protection Fund (OFPF) to help with the expenditures and research required for the suit. Loiselle, who directs the fund, says that the SOD is currently working with brokers, buyers and traders of organic canola to arrive at an accurate determination of how much income prairie farmers and handlers have lost because they can no longer produce uncontaminated organic canola.

The SOD has called for a moratorium on the planting of all GE crops in Saskatchewan. “We’re seeking compensation for what’s happened with canola,” Loiselle explains. “But the part of the suit where we ask the court for an injunction to prevent them from introducing GE wheat is even more critical. Wheat is by far our most important crop in the prairies, and if GE wheat is introduced and contaminates our organic wheat crops, that would probably mean the end of most organic agriculture in Canada’s prairies.”

Organic agriculture is important to the province. The directorate estimates that more than 1,000 organic farmers in Saskatchewan farm roughly half a million hectares of land. Recently, Premier Lorne Calvert cut short a visit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow (where Calvert was part of a diplomatic and trade mission led by Prime Minister Jean Chrétien) so he could host a Saskatchewan reception in Nuremberg, Germany, at the BioFach conference, Europe’s big annual Organic food trade fair.

The ease with which GE crop varieties can transfer their engineered gene combinations to other crops has recently been demonstrated in central Mexico, the ancestral home of corn, where many ancient varieties are still grown. Modified corn that was imported from the United States and planted here has since contaminated some of Mexico’s ancient crops with GE genes. Plant scientists say that, in the future, it may be difficult to maintain pure strains of natural corn because GE pollen is ubiquitous and tends to be dominant when crossbreeding occurs.

“Looking beyond economics,” Loiselle says, “crossbreeding with GE crops is eroding the genetic diversity of major food crops, and this could result in food shortages or worse if one or more of the major crops that now feed the world should be lost or heavily damaged by disease.

“We’re trying to protect our organic farms and our livelihoods,” he says, “and we’re also trying to protect the genetic heritage that makes it possible for farmers to keep supplying the world with food.”