The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) says allegations that a lobby group had inappropriate input into guidelines governing seed, including gene-edited seeds, are inaccurate and misleading.
“The CFIA always authors its own independent guidance and policies,” a CFIA spokesperson said in a statement sent to the Co-operator. “External parties, including industry associations, are never the authors of CFIA documents.”
On October 17, the National Farmers Union, along with a group of organizations, called for CFIA president Siddika Mithani to be replaced, based on what it says is evidence that agrochemical and plant science group CropLife “is effectively directing the CFIA,” on how to write the guidelines, it said in a news release.
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The allegations are based on reporting from CBC Radio-Canada. In September, Radio-Canada obtained Word document drafts of the proposed CFIA guidance. Meta data attached to the file named a CropLife employee as the author of the document.
“As a public regulator, empowered by laws and regulations passed by democratically elected members of Parliament, the CFIA is accountable to the public, not to the companies it regulates,” said NFU member Terry Boehm in the news release.
[RELATED] CropLife not driving CFIA policy, agency says
The CFIA said it consulted multiple companies, organizations, plant breeders and the public, and then used feedback to update “all its working documents within one of the returned copies.”
This led to a CropLife employee being erroneously identified as the author, it said in the statement.
It was a “glitch,” said Ian Affleck, CropLife Canada’s vice president of plant biotechnology in an interview with the Co-operator.
“CropLife Canada did not author any document,” Affleck said.
The pending CFIA guidelines will add clarification on when new seeds must go through pre-market safety checks before being released to the public. This will include gene-edited and conventionally bred seed.
Draft CFIA guidelines show that many gene-edited seed varieties that introduce changes “comparable to conventional breeding outcomes” and not containing foreign DNA won’t need special CFIA authorization to be released to market.
In a letter to federal Ag Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau, the NFU, Greenpeace Canada, Sierra Club BC, Environmental Defense and other groups said this proposed system would “benefit the multinational seed corporations by allowing them to release many new gene-edited seed varieties without independent government safety assessments or other government oversight.”
This would harm farmers who serve “sensitive markets,” the letter said, and would “weaken public trust.”
The organic sector, for instance, has objected to the proposed CFIA guidelines and parallel Health Canada guidance, released earlier this year. Gene-edited seed is prohibited under organic certification.
Under the proposed guidelines, “you wouldn’t even know what is a GE [gene edited] seed anymore, and you could inadvertently buy a GE patented technology and plant it and lose your organic certification,” said Tia Loftsgard, executive director of of the Canadian Organic Trade Alliance in an interview with the Co-operator.
“Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) are working closely with stakeholders to determine the best path forward to ensure the continued competitiveness of both the organic and non-organic sectors,” a government spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
