“We need mandatory, independent safety assessments and mandatory reporting to government for all gene-edited seeds and foods,” said the National Farmers Union in a news release that continues its campaign against government policy.
“The current tools used to identify transgenic crops for GMO labelling by sensitive markets such as the EU cannot find gene-edited crops,” it said.
“However, several scientists have now published methodologies to detect them.
“Allowing biotech companies to market gene-edited seed without mandatory public disclosure puts huge financial risks on farmers who will pay the cost when buyers use these tools and find unwanted gene-edited products,” the NFU said.
“How will our agriculture sector recover if our export customers lose trust in Canada?”
Organic grower organizations have raised similar concerns, including cross-pollination with CRISPR-technology varieties in adjacent fields.
On the other hand, those who favour CRISPR technology say it enables more precision in plant breeding and therefore faster progress in developing varieties with desirable traits.
They also say there are no differences in resulting crops between this precise breeding approach and traditional crop breeding that uses scatter-gun genetic changes using tools such as chemicals to generate mass mutations.
The EU allows these mass-mutation plant-breeding technologies and , for example, all of its commercial barley varieties have all been produced this way. They are also grown by organic farmers in the EU.
