Health Canada levels the field for GMOs

With very little fanfare, in the middle of May, the federal government ushered in a significant change to the way it regulates food-based products developed with gene editing technologies.

After a review of how these technologies have been used in plant breeding, Health Canada concluded that they should be treated like any other product in this category. More specifically, the department concluded that genetically modified plants should only be assessed based on their final characteristics, and not with reference to the method that developed these plants in the first place.

“As such, it is the scientific opinion of Health Canada that gene editing technologies do not present any unique or specifically identifiable food safety concerns as compared to other technologies of plant development,” says the official statement on the change. “Therefore, gene-edited plant products should be regulated like all other products of plant breeding within the Novel Food Regulations (i.e., by the characteristics they exhibit and how these characteristics impact food safety).”

Canada’s Novel Food Regulations, introduced in 1999, permit the commercial production of edible plants with novel characteristics, such as adaptability to extreme temperatures or an ability to use less water. Such novel traits have been bred into staple crops over the course of centuries or millennia, leading to iconic success stories like modern strains of North American wheat or corn, which emerged over thousands of years from what was a collection of sorry-looking Middle Eastern grasses.

Advances in molecular biology have recently made it possible to obtain such dramatic alterations in as little as one or two years, a pace that has generated sometimes strident opposition to these genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

Opponents of GMOs have insisted that these food products should be distinguished and separated from their non-GMO counterparts. These measures would include requiring these products to be labeled as such for commercial sale or banned altogether, based solely on their origins in gene editing, rather than any particular feature they might display.

Health Canada’s scientific opinion sets aside this approach, so that plants with novel traits (PNTs) are assessed in the same way, whether they are the result of some longstanding breeding technique or an alternation in their genome.

For Dr. Stuart Smyth, PhD, who holds the Agri-Food Innovation and Sustainability Enhancement Chair at the University of Saskatchewan, Health Canada’s revised posture opens up new possibilities for Canadian food production. He and his colleagues have polled plant breeders about the effect of regulations on any work with GMOs, who responded that the added costs and logistical requirements discouraged them from exploring the possibilities of gene-editing.

For example, PNT test plots had to be fully isolated from any fields with conventional crops, which would make this kind of investigation an expensive proposition in academic or public science settings. Such stipulations led to more than three-quarters of the respondents suggesting that the previous regulations were impeding progress or innovation in this sector.

“They were deliberately stopping research when they identified the variety would be a PNT,” says Smyth.

At the same time, Canadian consumers were expressing a confidence in the country’s regulators to introduce these new products without compromising the safety of the food system. In a separate survey of the general population, Smyth’s team found that many people did not appreciate the way in which new plant varieties were created, whether by traditional hybridization or novel gene editing.

“There is, therefore, a definite need for better scientific disclosure to educate consumers about gene editing technology,” they concluded in an article on this poll. “Findings from the consumer survey also revealed that most Canadians believe there are benefits to gene editing technology, particularly with respect to nutrition, and reduction of pesticide residues in food and in the environment.”

Genetic modification a low priority for most consumers

Smyth makes it clear that there is still a certain amount of distrust in the way industry creates and markets different types of novel food products. However, his inquiries have shown that genetic modification is a low priority for most grocery shoppers.

“We give them a list of 10 or 12 attributes, but GM ingredients come in near the bottom,” he explains. “It’s price, it’s safety, it’s nutrition, it’s local – those are the top four. And time after time, it’s price. Price is top of mind in most food purchasing decisions.”

Health Canada’s scientific opinion applies specifically to the gene editing of plants, and includes a number of provisos, such as the fact that the resulting changes should not alter the food use of a plant or introduce foreign DNA.

Nevertheless, Smyth regards this move as a game-changer, even in less obvious areas such as forestry. He suggests that if a genetic tweak would allow trees to generate bacillus thuringiensis, an environmentally benign bacteria that fends off lethal attacks from spruce budworm, the result would offset the growing threat of wildfires.

“So much of our forest fire damage is because we have millions of acres of dead trees,” he says. “If we had healthy forests, that would retard the fires that are consuming all this dead wood.”

Nor are the gains in agricultural output limited to food production. Smyth underscores that for decades innovation has been a potent force to limit farming’s environmental footprint on the planet.

“We’ve decoupled agriculture from increased land use,” he says. “The OECD has shown that since 1960, production has increased 390 per cent, yet we are only using 10 per cent more land.”

Nevertheless, global acceptance of gene editing in agriculture is far from complete. Although Canada’s regulations for PNTs now match those of the U.S., Australia, Brazil, and Argentina, the EU generally opposes any widespread use of this technology. That could represent a problem over the longer term, as the still-growing human population calls for countries to use every advantage they can find to optimize food production.

When that does not happen, disaster can follow, as the government of Sri Lanka learned after adopting an ambitious policy that exclusively embraced organic farming and wound up compromising the nation’s ability to feed itself. A crisis that began on farms eventually turned into a violent overthrow of the government, a lesson that Smyth believes will not be lost on leaders elsewhere in the world.

“Governments are saying we really need to reject the messaging from these European-based environmental organizations – we need to look at this from our own perspective and we will decide what’s best for us,” he says. “It’s really refreshing that governments in various parts of the world that need more food production are now turning to gene editing as a solution, to reduce the amount of money they’re spending importing food products to feed their population.”

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