Genetically modified flax sent to Europe puts industry in limbo

According to Wikipedia, the story's protagonist is Bill Masen, "an Englishman who has made his living working with 'triffids,' plants capable of aggressive and seemingly intelligent behaviour: They are able to move about on their three 'legs,' appear to communicate with each other and possess a deadly whip-like poisonous sting that enables them to kill and feed on the rotting carcasses of their victims."

The plants were featured in a BBC radio dramatization of the book in 1957, a film version in 1962 and then a sequel film called Night of the Triffids in 2001.

Here we are in 2009, and triffids have surfaced again -- except this time in a real-life sequel, which, for lack of a better title, we'll call Return of the Triffid.

As with most real-life scenarios, this triffid is much more benign than its fictional counterpart. It was the curious choice of name for a variety of flax developed by the University of Saskatchewan's Crop Development Centre in the late 1990s that was genetically modified to withstand herbicide residues. And the protagonists in this story -- western Canadian flax growers -- are hardly movie stars. In fact, they'd much prefer being left out of the international spotlight. Nevertheless, the apparent resurfacing of CDC Triffid in Canadian flax exports, even though everyone thought it was dead and buried long ago, is about as close as it gets to waking up to discover your nightmare wasn't a dream.

CDC Triffid was voluntarily withdrawn from the Canadian list of registered flax varieties in 2001, not because there was anything wrong with it, but because Canada's key export markets for flax in Europe had not yet approved genetically modified crops.

The variety met all of the Canadian requirements assessing Plants with Novel Traits (PNT) and had been declared safe for environmental release and for human and livestock consumption.

It was in the process of being commercialized and seed was in the hands of seed breeders when flax grower organizations got cold feet.

It was becoming clear from the reactions in Europe to other genetically modified crops, such as canola and soybeans, that approvals might not be in place before the flax variety was in farmers' fields. Industry officials were afraid that if GM flax found its way to markets that weren't ready to accept it, both demand and prices could be decimated. So the variety was recalled, deregistered and the existing seed disposed of -- or so everyone thought.

Then European labs last summer detected traces of a genetic marker indicating the presence of genetically modified organisms in Canadian flax shipments.

Tests have not yet determined conclusively that the GM flax is Triffid -- but it is the most likely on a long list of unlikely scenarios. The question of how or why it has surfaced now, or whether it was there all along, has a lot of people in this business scratching their heads.

Flax is one of the crops for which a high proportion of farmers keep seed back from one year to replant the next, so it's possible that farmers may not have even known they were producing it. But how they got it in the first place is still open for question.

And even if farmers were deliberately growing it, they weren't necessarily breaking the law. The flax had PNT clearance in Canada. It is not illegal to grow an unregistered crop variety as long as the farmer doesn't sell it by variety name and as long as it is delivered into the lowest-quality category when it goes to the elevator.

Officials are, however, in the process of checking samples collected when farmers deliver to see if they can pinpoint geographically where the GM flax originated.

The one thing that is clear from the ensuing fallout is that the industry's concerns were justified. There is very little flax moving right now, at any price. In order to regain the confidence of export customers, the industry may have to do away with farm-saved seed -- which permanently increases farmers' production costs.

As stories go, Return of the Triffid is a cautionary one. For starters, once the genetic genie is out of the bottle, it's pretty tough to stuff it back in. And even though there's been a lot of rhetoric in recent years convincing farmers they can be rugged individualists and go it alone, when it comes to the export business, they are all in it together.

Laura Rance is editor of the Manitoba Co-operator. She can be reached at 792-4382 or by email: laura@fbcpublishing.com.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition October 3, 2009 B4