Blowing in the wind

A FARM dispute between friends came to involve some big players.

GM farmer Michael Baxter after winning the case. Picture: Ross Swanborough.

IF truth is the first casualty of war, then the tussle for the hearts and minds of Australian consumers over genetically modified food has become a full-scale battleground.

The conclusion this week of the West Australian Supreme Court case that pitted two farmers and boyhood mates from Changerup against each other — after some GM-variety canola plants grown by Michael Baxter were blown across a boundary fence and road in 2010 on to the organic farm of his neighbour, Steve Marsh — was never about whether food produced from genetically engineered crops was safe to eat or a serious threat to consumers.

Nor was the case likely to determine whether Australian farmers should be allowed to grow GM-bred canola, whether crop ­varieties developed using modern biotechnology methods were better in performance and outcome than more conventionally bred var­ieties, or whether Australia should ban GM crop varieties altogether and stop the rapid spread of their adoption.

And only tangentially did the case look as if its outcome would decide if organic farmers, who make up 2 per cent of the farming fraternity, had the right to prevent their neighbours growing GM crops — or to impose radical changes on their use — because of the potential for low-level accidental contamination.

Yet that is just how the civil case brought by Marsh against Baxter has been portrayed for the past three years: as a landmark judgment that might break the all-pervasive grip of multinational chemical and genetically modified seed companies such as Bayer and Monsanto on the future of farm and food production in Australia.

On one side was Marsh, of Eagle Rest farm, popularly depicted as the small, environmentally concerned, organic farmer fighting the multinational chemical ­giants, who had lost his livelihood and his preferred way of producing safe and local food because of the actions of an inconsiderate neighbour dazzled by biotechnology.

Environmental groups such as Greenpeace, the Safe Food Foundation, the GM-Free Australia ­Alliance, organic farmers and law firm Slater & Gordon all pitched in behind Marsh, funding his long legal bid for compensation and damages. Pop concerts and rainbow rallies were held in his support; hundreds of health food shops around Australia put out posters and money boxes championing his cause.

On the other side was Baxter, a sheep and cropping farmer on the neighbouring, bigger, farm Seven­oaks, who had grown two pad­docks of the new GM-canola variety in 2010, the first year the West Australian government authorised its use.

He was painted as the uncaring, businesslike face of farming, dedicated to making money at all costs, regardless of food safety, the environment or the livelihood of his organic neighbour.

This perception only deepened when his defence case against Marsh’s claim was financially backed by the WA Pastoralists and Graziers Association, and adopted by the combined might of the global chemical companies, through their Canberra-based CropLife lobby group, as all about defending the right of Australian farmers to choose to grow legal GM-crops without interference.

Small wonder that both men felt their own voices were sometimes lost in the clamour and noise.

After a hard day’s shearing last year, Baxter told The Australian he felt more like the “the little guy fighting the multinationals’’ than Marsh.

“He’s now got all these big, well-funded extremist groups behind his cause, like Greenpeace, and all these city types like Slater & Gordon fundraising for him and holding rock concerts because they say it is a landmark case.

“Unfortunately I think Steve has fallen into the trap of being used by these anti-GM people with their global agenda; I’m afraid this case seems to have become nothing about him and me down here on the farm but all about these people determined to get GM crops banned worldwide.’’

Marsh, in turn, has always denied he was being manipulated and used by global environmental groups for their own purposes in bringing the case against Baxter.

He saw his legal quest as about his right to farm in the way he wanted at Eagle Rest, and under the management system he believes is best for his land, his animals, his family and consumers.

“When I started this, I had an open mind about GM technology as long as it didn’t affect me as a farmer,’’ Marsh said. “But now I have read thousands of documents since this all began; I really do have concerns about many more things about the technology and whether GM food is safe.’’

With the wisdom of Solomon, Supreme Court Judge Kenneth Martin in his judgment on Wednesday whittled the Marsh v Baxter case free of all self-interested parties and “landmark” GM-breaking precedents, paring it back to its essentials.

In doing so, he found Baxter had done nothing wrong in growing and harvesting his GM canola crop, and could not be held responsible for strong winds that had blown some plants on to Marsh’s organic paddocks, causing contamination.

Martin also ruled that the GM canola plants were absolutely “benign”, posed absolutely no physical, health or harmful risk to the Marsh family, their property or animals, and that there was “zero potential” and “no scientific basis” for claims the GM canola from Sevenoaks had “impacted negatively against the neighbouring ­organic farming operations of the Marshes at Eagle Rest”.

Instead, Martin found the ­National Association for Sustainable Agriculture was to blame for Marsh’s financial woes, wrongly stripping 70 per cent of his farm of its organic status for three years, contrary to its own rules and Australian national ­organic standards relating to accidental or adventitious wind drift contamination by a few GM plants, through no fault or deliberate intent of the organic farmer.

Martin called the NASA’s decision to decertify Marsh’s farm once GM-canola stalks were found lying in some paddocks — despite their not being used at the time for organic sheep, wheat or rye production — a “gross over­reaction”.

He also suggested Marsh might better seek to claim the loss of $85,000 of his organic income from NASA, rather than from Baxter, for its wrongful interpretation of what constituted “zero tolerance” of the accidental presence of GM organisms on any organic farm.

King Wood Mallesons Perth partner Sally Audeyev says the case proved in the end to be more about a simple dispute between neighbours than a precedent-making case affecting how farmers grow GM crops.

Charles Sturt University’s emeritus professor in agriculture Jim Pratley calls it a landmark ruling and a “victory for common sense”.

“The rights of a farmer to grow a legal crop have been reaffirmed by the Supreme Court and acts of nature, such as wind drift, are just part of that operation,” Pratley says. “Coexistence of various production systems, whether conventional, GM or organic, needs to be the guiding principle; (it now appears) the issue of accreditation is the main problem.”

But neither proponents nor ­opponents of GM crops have been silenced by the judgment.

The next focus, it appears, will be on Australia’s federal Department of Agriculture, and whether it should change existing standards that set a “zero tolerance” for all GM material on organically certified farms.

In the US, a farm or its produce can still be classified as organic even if a few individual GM plants are found on the property, if they got there through accidental or “adventitious” presence, as ­occurred at Changerup.

In Europe, organic certification and labelling is legal as long as no more than 1 per cent contamination of a crop, field or food product by GM seeds or plants occurs.

“It is difficult to see why the Australian industry is so insistent on its policy, as it is likely to be unworkable in the long run; biological systems can never be 100 per cent controlled and so it is nonsense to pretend,” Pratley says.

“Clearly, this is part of the fear campaign against GM crops, but it was interesting that Justice Martin commented that he had ‘no empirical evidence presented to me about any such benefits in organically grown produce’.”

WHAT ARE GM CROPS?

GENETIC engineering and genetic modification refer to techniques that allow specific pieces of DNA to be moved from one organism and inserted into another. The intention of GM is that the piece or pieces of DNA transferred to create a new crop variety are a specific gene or genes (the transferred genes are called transgenes) that code for a desired trait such as herbicide tolerance, disease resistance, drought hardiness or higher yield. That trait is then expressed in the receiving organism which, when done multiple times and bred out, becomes a new variety of canola, wheat or other crop or plant.

The novelty of GM is that specific pieces of DNA can be moved between organisms by defining and selecting a single gene; and the technique allows DNA to be moved between any organisms rather than being limited (as in nature) by species boundaries and/or sexual compatibility requirements.

As such, the possibilities in terms of what genes (or DNA) may be transferred into an organism are almost endless.

Roundup Ready canola — the Monsanto variety grown by Michael Baxter on his Sevenoaks farm near Kojonup in Western Australia — is an example of a GM crop with herbicide tolerance (specifically to weedkiller glyphosate). It allows farmers to spray Roundup on their canola crop when it is almost fully grown, with only unwanted weeds being killed but not the crop. It is achieved by transferring two new (not naturally occurring) genes into canola from soil bacteria using GM techniques. They make the RR canola insensitive to the sprayed herbicide and able to break it down into harmless by-products.

Farmers such as Baxter pay a higher price for the RR canola seed than for conventional canola, as it includes a licensing and crop-breeding fee to Monsanto.

Baxter told the WA Supreme Court he averaged 5-10 per cent higher yields from his GM canola crop.

But in paddocks where weeds such as ryegrass had become resistant to low levels of glyphosate sprays and competed heavily for water and soil nutrients, the ability to spray his GM canola at higher herbicide dosages and later in the growing season lifted his canola seed yields by as much as 30 per cent.

Multinational chemical companies such as Syngenta, Bayer and Monsanto — which have transformed themselves from sellers of farm chemicals to hi-tech seed breeding companies — claim it costs them $100 million to breed, develop and trial a new GM crop variety before it is ready for commercial release.

FACTS AND FIGURES

• 12 per cent of the world’s crops are now GM varieties

• 43 per cent of the world’s GM crops are grown in the US, with 93 per cent of cotton, 86 per cent of corn, 93 per cent of soybean and 95 per cent of sugar beet all genetically modified varieties

• Almost all cotton in Australia is now GM, which makes cotton plants resistant to a damaging insect pest and reduces by half the need to spray

• 70 per cent of supermarket processed foods sold in the US contain some GM products

• 97 per cent of all canola crops grown in Canada are GM

• No GM wheat crops are grown commercially globally, but are being trialled in Australia for commercial release in 2015

• The first GM sugarcane crops have just been approved for trials in Australia

• The global area of GM crops has increased 100-fold in the 18 years since first commercialised in 1996 — by Australian cotton farmers — and is expanding at 6 per cent a year

• More than 17 million farmers worldwide grow GM crop

• Australia has the 13th largest area of biotech (GM) crops in the world, with 700,000ha planted, mainly to GM canola and cotton.

• 2 per cent of Australian farms are organic

• There is broad scientific consensus that food derived from GM crops poses no risk to human health