London, UK -- AWB Ltd. and the United Kingdom's national flour millers' association last week expressed concern about the potential for increasing trade restrictions to and consumers' rejection of genetically modified grains. Officials from these two organizations were speaking here at the International Grains Council's Grain Conference 2002.

"The Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety could soon impact upon all exporters and importers of grain," said AWB Ltd. chairman Brendan Stewart.

The protocol, negotiated in the United Nations Environment Program, was aimed at regulating the export of Living Modified Organisms, a category which included genetically modified grains, he noted. Stewart said the protocol could hit both supporters and opponents of the new technology.

"This is because it represents the introduction of the precautionary principle into trade," he said. "Consequently, a 100,000 tonne non-GM wheat shipment could be classified as an LMO export under the Protocol because it contains minute traces of GMOs."

Stewart said that the protocol's potential effects resulted in grain marketers and traders from countries such as Canada, the U.S., Europe, Argentina, Mexico, and Australia forming the International Grain Trade Coalition. These groups agreed that a 5 per cent threshold for the presence of GM material in a non-GM shipment was necessary for the protocol to work and for shippers of non-GM to be able to continue to operate as such.

"The group is yet to be successful in having this threshold agreed to, but it has been very important to injecting a sense of realism into the discussion over the Cartagena protocol," Stewart said.

Alexander Waugh, director general of the National Association of British and Irish Millers (NABIM), the UK flour millers' trade association, noted during his speech that biotechnology, which should have been a positive story, has been far from it. At the moment, no customers in the UK or EU want to buy GM products, he said.

UK millers use about 5.5 million tonnes of soft wheat per year while the EU milling industry consumes about 32 million tonnes, Waugh said. According to Brian White of the Canadian Wheat Board's market analysis division, the CWB typically exports 300,000 to 350,000 tonnes of wheat to the UK and 1.0 million to 1.4 million tonnes of wheat to the EU.

Waugh said that UK/EU millers will exclude GM wheat from their purchases for the foreseeable future. There are, however, currently no transgenic varieties of wheat or barley registered for commercial production. The CWB has said that the earliest any transgenic wheat variety could be considered for registration in Canada is 2003 or later.

The CWB has urged caution over Canada accepting GM wheat and barley varieties, saying that such varieties should not be available for production in western Canada until proven technologies and protocols could guarantee the ability to segregate transgenic from non-transgenic crops.

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