WITH genetically modified (GM) crop use dominating news this week, South Australian Agriculture Minister Leon Bignell has again stirred up debate with a feisty speech at a recent anti-GM rally.
The worldwide March Against Monsanto rally last weekend attracted a crowd of up to 300 people in Adelaide, but it was Mr Bignell’s attendance which drew the ire of grain growers who oppose SA’s GM moratorium.
Those who want GM crops are “the big poison companies because they want to own the seeds and they want to control everything”, Mr Bignell said, backing Grain Producers SA chief executive Darren Arney’s claim of anti-GM bias against the Agriculture Minister.
But Mr Bignell said if GPSA wanted to accuse him of bias against GM foods, then he should also be called biased against fruit fly and phylloxera.
"I'm biased against anything that could harm our reputation for having premium food and wine from a clean environment," he said.
Mr Bignell earned a loud cheer from rally protesters after saying he celebrated “the fact that SA is the only mainland state in Australia where it’s illegal to grow GM crops”. He said the Liberals went to the recent SA election saying they agreed with Labor and the Greens’ stance that SA should remain GM-free under the moratorium until at least 2019.
Kangaroo Island Pure Grain was "a great example" of how farmers had reached premium prices by banding together to market their GM-free produce together, he said.
"I've actually asked PIRSA to get a discussion going with people right around the state, including Viterra and the GPSA, to talk about why we can't band together under a common SA GM-free brand."
Mr Bignell recently returned from Shanghai where Chinese officials and food buyers were "adamant" they wanted non-GM foods, as were Japanese and European Union delegations.
However, Mr Bignell failed to mention a public statement in March by China’s Agriculture Minister Han Changfu, saying that he eats GM food.
“I now also eat food processed from GM raw materials, specifically soybean oil, because it's mainly made from imported soybeans, most of which are genetically modified,” he was reported as saying in an article on China Daily.
While not against the use of chemicals on-farm, nor specialised breeding and similar research being undertaken at the Waite Institute, Mr Bignell said GM food was "completely different".
"This is about putting different species together and modifying the genes as they are, and I think where I'm coming from is where the consumer is at the moment.”
Mr Arney said the Minister’s participation in the rally showed the State government’s wasn’t listening to the grain industry’s needs, “as one of the biggest export-earning industries in this State”.
"The march is also a rally against the legal use of crop-protection products to deliver clean, fresh food," Mr Arney said.
"So it is not clear as to whether the State government is suggesting that we shouldn't be using chemicals in primary production at all, even though their departments use them for weed control, such as in forests."
He said Mr Bignell's concerns that there could be long-term health ramifications that were not yet known about GM crops contradicted statements by Food Standards Australia New Zealand, which said it had never identified any safety concerns with any of the GM foods it had assessed, nor had national regulators assessing the same food independently.
"GPSA is also calling on the government to publicly disclose the figures that prove by being GM-free, the SA economy is receiving an economic benefit," Mr Arney said.
"Last harvest, SA canola was sold for $15 a tonne less than Vic canola where GMs are grown, showing there was no financial benefit to grain producers being GM-free."
Mr Bignell said that while he could accept that Food Standards had tested successfully and found no safety concerns with the GM food it had assessed, so far as he was aware there had never been any conclusive multi-generation research released on the long-term impacts of GM food.
He also read out quotes from Federal Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce at the rally, saying he “seems to be a little bit confused about what GM is and what breeding is”.
“I mean, this guy doesn’t get the difference between evolution and genetic mutilation and modification,” he said.
“If people don’t know the difference between evolution and genetic modification, we need to get that message across.”
Mr Bignell finished his speech by urging the rally attendees to “remain vigilant”.
“Apathy is the thing that will bring down the GM moratorium in SA and we can’t afford that,” he said.
Joint CEO of the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics Michael Gilbert also attended the March Against Monsanto rally and said it was “underwhelming”.
“It wasn’t well attended and it was just the same old hysterical stuff peddled many times before,” he said.
“People are entitled to their opinions but I just wish they based their opinion on facts.”
Mr Gilbert said talks at the rally “would rank highly with other conspiracy theories” and stressed the anti-GM debate was “dominated by a noisy few”.
In 2003 all States and Territories, except Queensland and the Northern Territory, enacted GM crop moratorium legislation to delay the commercial production of GM canola until marketing and trade considerations had been addressed.
Four Australian states initiated reviews of their GM moratoriums in 2007, and NSW and Victoria subsequently allowed the commercial production of GM canola licensed by the federal government Gene Technology Regulator. South Australia decided to extend its moratorium. Tasmania’s moratorium remains in force. Western Australia lifted its moratorium on the commercial production of GM cotton in the Ord irrigation area in November 2008.
- with FarmOnline
