Over four years, the agricultural biotechnology developer will receive $2,325,361 to develop a high-yielding, climate change-resistant soybean and enable field testing.

“Soybean farming is a cornerstone of agriculture here in Canada,” said Lawrence MacAulay, Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food, in a media release. “This funding is vitally important to helping our hardworking farmers tackle extreme weather and keep growing the top-quality crops Canada is known for.”

Mark Gerretsen, MP for Kingston and the Islands, announced the AgriScience Program—Projects Component funding, an initiative under the Sustainable Canadian Agricultural Partnership, on July 31 at PPI’s Kingston facility.

Why it matters: Soybeans generate $14 billion in annual economic output and are Canada’s third largest field crop.

Dr. Yafan Huang, PPI CEO, stated genetic seed research and development assists producers and the soy industry by enhancing resilience and yield, leading to increased acreage and withstand frequent extreme weather events while reducing its environmental footprint.

“We are grateful to have AAFC’s further support through its AgriScience Program to complete the development of climate-resilient, high-yielding soybeans with enhanced carbon sequestration,” said Huang in the statement. “Successful introduction of Performance Plants’ validated technologies to this crop will help to secure and grow this important Canadian industry amid increasingly challenging climate conditions.” 

PPI’s objective is to create soybean varieties with increased heat and drought tolerance, herbicide resistance, water efficiency and the ability to sequester carbon into the soil through soybean trait and genome development.

“Supporting innovation is key to our farmers’ future,” said Gerretsen in the release.

PPI received over $2 million in funding under the previous framework, the Canadian Agricultural Partnership, to develop technologies that achieve higher and more consistent crop yields via improved heat tolerance, drought tolerance and reduced water requirements.

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Canada requested the talks on Tuesday, according to Bloomberg, a day after the U.S. requested formal trade consultations over its objections to Mexico’s plans to limit imports of GM corn and other agricultural biotechnology products.

“Canada will always work with the U.S. and Mexico to strengthen our trade relationship and grow a clean, green agriculture sector,” a spokesperson for Canada’s Trade Minister Mary Ng said in a statement.

The Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement on trade (CUSMA) “has the ability to hold technical consultations to better understand how our policies are to be implemented under this agreement,” the spokesperson said, without explicitly confirming the report.

Mexico plans to regulate GM corn for human consumption, which U.S. officials say puts some US$5 billion of U.S. corn exports to Mexico at risk and could stifle biotechnology innovation.

Canada, however, is not a major corn exporter and Ottawa is concerned overall about Mexico putting arbitrary prohibitions on agriculture produced using biotechnology, Bloomberg reported.

It is also concerned about Mexico’s lack of respect for the CUSMA trade pact, according to the report.

A spokeswoman for Mexico’s economy ministry did not respond to a request for comment on the report.

Mexico says GM seeds can contaminate the country’s age-old native varieties and has questioned their impact on human health. U.S. officials have criticized Mexico’s plans as not being science-based and warn that any restriction of genetically modified corn could morph into an all-out trade dispute under CUSMA.

— Reporting for Reuters by Ismail Shakil in Ottawa and Cassandra Garrison in Chicago.

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The European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled in 2018 that mutagenesis, among so-called new breeding techniques (NBT) based on targeted editing of genes, fall under rules applying to GMOs that incorporate DNA from a different species.

The decision was welcomed by some environmentalists who have long opposed GMOs as a threat to ecosystems, and criticized by seed makers and scientists as penalizing Europe’s agricultural research capacity.

“NBTs are not GMOs,” Agriculture Minister Julien Denormandie said in an interview published by several farming news outlets, including Agra Presse on Friday.

“This (NBT) technology allows much quicker development of a variety that could have emerged naturally at some point, and that is a very good thing,” he said, calling for NBT not to be regulated like GMOs.

The agriculture ministry confirmed the comments on Monday.

The EU’s executive in late 2019 requested a study on the issue that is due to be submitted by the end of April this year.

France is the EU’s largest agricultural producer and among EU members to have banned cultivation of GMO crops.

England’s farming minister announced earlier this month a public consultation on gene editing in agriculture, saying Britain’s exit from the EU allowed it to set its own rules.

The French government is also considering how to respond to a ruling last year by the country’s top administrative court requiring it to change its mutagenesis regulations in line with the EU court’s decision.

— Reporting for Reuters by Gus Trompiz in Paris.

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As a result, some products could be sold to farmers without a USDA review — a move that comes despite concerns by consumer groups over biotech crops.

Why it matters: The approval of crop varieties created through novel breeding methods has been a long and expensive process.

The final rule is the first major overhaul of USDA’s regulations over biotech plants, seeds and microbes since 1987, the agency said. Previously, USDA’s review system focused on genetically modified organisms, where a gene is added from another organism.

Existing regulations have not kept up with emerging technologies such as plant gene editing, which works like the find-and-replace function on a word processor: It finds a gene and then makes changes by amending or deleting it.

Scientists can edit genomes more precisely and rapidly, and altered agricultural products could get to market more quickly and cheaply, say biotech advocates.

If a company uses biotech to create a product that has traits that could have been achieved through traditional plant breeding, it would no longer have to go through a pre-market review through USDA, the agency said.

Such products typically require USDA to conduct a risk assessment of whether they can cause or spread plant diseases, among other vetting. Some of those products also are reviewed or regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, which has oversight over food safety, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

“If it’s a GMO, that’s basically what they’ve been looking at over and over again for the past 20 years. They’re saying they don’t need to look at new examples,” said Clint Nesbitt, senior director of science and regulatory affairs with Biotechnology Innovation Organization, an industry group that represents companies such as Bayer.

“If what you’ve done with gene editing could have been done with plant breeding, you’re good to go,” Nesbitt said.

The change, first proposed during the Obama administration, comes after U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order last summer directing federal agencies to streamline the review process for agricultural biotechnology including genetically modified livestock and seeds.

Consumers have pushed for years for greater transparency over what is in their food, fighting for GMO labeling on consumer products against pushback from farmers, biotech firms and food companies that argue such genetically engineered ingredients are safe.

Genetically modified crops were a sticking point between the United States and China during their trade war. Beijing took years to approve new strains of those crops, which U.S. companies and farmers have complained stalls trade by restricting the sales of new products.

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While genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are considered safe by an overwhelming majority of scientists, including the National Academy of Sciences, the World Health Organization, and the American Medical Association, only about one-third of consumers share that view.

A team of psychologists and biologists from the University of Rochester, the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and Cardiff University in Wales, set out to discover if the schism could be overcome; that is, to see if consumers’ attitudes would change if the public understood the underlying science better.

The short answer is “yes.”

The team’s findings were recently published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology.

“Political orientation and demographics inform attitudes and we can’t change those,” says Jonathon McPhetres, the study’s lead author who recently finished his PhD at the University of Rochester. Previous research has shown that more than half of Americans know very little or nothing at all about GM foods.

In a series of studies, the team discovered that people’s existing knowledge about GM food is the greatest determining factor of their attitudes toward the food — overriding all other tested factors. In fact, existing GM knowledge was more than 19 times higher as a determinant — compared to the influence of demographic factors such as a person’s education, socioeconomic status, race, age and gender.

The team replicated the U.S. findings in the United Kingdom and the Nether- lands, where opposition to modified food has tended to be higher than in the United States, and where GM food is highly regulated in response to consumer concerns.

The team found that specific knowledge about GM food and procedures is independent from a person’s general science knowledge — making the first (GM knowledge) a nearly twice as strong predictor of GM attitudes.

The researchers followed up by conducting a five-week longitudinal study with 231 undergraduates in the U.S. to test, first, if a lack of knowledge about GM foods could be overcome by teaching participants the basic science behind GM technology, and second, if greater knowledge would alter attitudes.

Their findings, argues the team, lend direct support for the deficit model of science attitudes, which, in broad terms, holds that the public’s skepticism toward science and technology is largely due to a lack of understanding, or absence of pertinent information.

McPhetres is now heading to Canada for a joint post-doctoral appointment between the University of Regina in Saskatchewan and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Trump signed the order during a visit to an ethanol plant in Council Bluffs, Iowa.

The executive order, he said, would “speed up reviews of biotechnology so that farmers can get access to critical scientific advances faster and reap the full benefits of American innovation for many years into the future.”

The White House said in a statement the order “will help eliminate delays, reduce developer costs and provide greater certainty about the review process for farmers.”

The Biotechnology Innovation Organization, an industry group that represents companies such as Bayer, said the order was an “important step forward to ensure government policy does not hinder 21st-century biotechnology from addressing the many global challenges.”

“America is on the threshold of entering a new era of sustainable agriculture and food production, and it’s important we get this right for farmers, consumers, U.S. companies, and the world as a whole,” said Jim Greenwood, chief executive of the organization.

The order directs the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency to work together on “common sense regulations and to develop awareness and education programs to gain acceptance of new technologies by consumers and global trading partners,” the National Pork Producers Council said.

The United States is falling behind countries such as Canada, Brazil and China that have established regulatory frameworks conducive to investment in the development of gene editing, said David Herring, president of the pork council and a hog farmer from Lillington, North Carolina.

“Today’s executive order paves the way for common sense regulation to keep America first in agriculture so that we remain the global leader in an economic sector that has offset the U.S. trade imbalance for decades,” Herring said.

Unlike traditional genetically modified organisms, in which a gene is added from another organism, gene editing works like the find-and-replace function on a word processor. It finds a gene and then makes changes by amending or deleting it.

Scientists can edit genomes more precisely and rapidly than ever before, and altered agricultural products could get to market more quickly and cheaply.

The U.S. told the World Trade Organization on Friday that it was planning to revise its regulations on importing, transporting and releasing GMOs.

— Roberta Rampton is Reuters’ White House correspondent based in Washington, D.C.; additional reporting by Tom Polansek in Chicago; writing by David Alexander and Mohammad Zargham.

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Beijing has taken years to approve new strains of GM crops, which U.S. companies and farmers have complained stalls trade by restricting the sales of new products from companies such as DowDuPont Inc., Bayer AG, and Syngenta AG.

Why it matters: The speed of approval has a significant effect on the ability of seed companies to continue to invest in crop genetic improvements.

The issue is one of a host of U.S. complaints that the administration of President Donald Trump is demanding China address if it wants to end trade disputes that have cost both countries billions of dollars and slowed the global economy.

Trump on April 4 said the two sides were getting very close to a deal that could be announced in about four weeks, though there were still differences to be bridged.

GM crops and the approval process are still a “big issue” in the discussions, said one of the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The issue has been a source of tension between the two countries for years. China is the biggest buyer of U.S. soybeans, the bulk of which are genetically modified. If it does not approve new strains, then farmers in the United States cannot plant them because China may reject shipments that include them.

Seed companies cannot fully commercialize sales of new strains without those approvals. The two sides had appeared to make some progress on the issue in January, when China approved a handful of GMO crops for import. They were the first in about 18 months. The move did not address the core U.S. concerns over delays to the process.

A spokesperson from the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, who is leading the Washington team in the discussions, did not respond immediately to requests for confirmation or comment.

China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs did not immediately respond to faxed questions April 5, which was a public holiday in China.

It is unclear what differences on the issue remain. The United States wants China to accelerate its approval process and make it more similar to Washington’s.

Beijing allows imports of GMO soybeans and corn for use in animal feed, even though it does not permit planting of them.

China bought about 60 per cent of U.S. soy exports, worth about $12 billion, before the ongoing U.S.-China trade war and could reject shipments of unapproved varieties.

Beijing promised to speed up its review of applications during previous trade talks with the United States in 2017. In the past, Beijing has held back approvals of imported GMO products amid concerns about anti-GMO sentiment in China.

The trade deal, should it be agreed, is expected to include a six-year time frame for purchases of more than $1 trillion in U.S. goods, including commodity products.

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Hosted by Ontario Agri-Food Technologies and CropLife Canada, the March 7 meeting provided an overview of gene-editing regulations in various countries around the world.

This provided context for the range of forms Canadian regulations could take, and the opportunities and pitfalls associated with them.

Why it matters: Canada’s thorough but inefficient regulatory system could limit farmer access to potentially useful gene-edited crops and animals.

Presenters and attendees voiced concern over the ambiguity of Canada’s current regulations on gene-editing.

Gene editing around the globe

Gene editing refers to genetic engineering technologies that add, remove, or somehow alter DNA within a plant or animal for a desired outcome such as disease resistance or a better nutrient profile.

This editing technology differs from other forms of genetic manipulation because it doesn’t involve the introduction of genetic material from foreign organisms, as is the case with GM crops like Bt corn. Instead, the DNA being altered exists within the specimen itself. Gene editing is also comparatively precise and quick to execute.

According to Stuart Smyth, genomics expert and associate professor with the University of Saskatchewan’s Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, countries like Argentina, Brazil, and the United States consider gene-edited plants to be separate from GMOs, as long as no foreign DNA is present. Thus, they do not require the same level of regulation, nor incur the same high regulatory costs.

By contrast, the European Union considers all genetic modification processes, including gene-editing, to be GMOs. Smyth says this has led to a significant and rapid drop in agriculture innovation investments in the EU, from a one-third share of global investments to just nine per cent at the end of 2018.

Canadian ambiguity creates unpredictability

Smyth detailed how Canada has yet to conclusively decide where regulations will land. Such ambiguity, he says, causes problems for plant breeders because it makes the process length and cost unpredictable.

SU Canola, a variety tolerant to the sulfonylurea herbicide, was successfully developed and commercialized in Canada in 2018. Despite its herbicide tolerance, neither government nor industry pushed back against its non-GMO marketing, seemingly indicating the government has taken a view where gene-editing and GMOs are in fact viewed separately, although no formal documentation proving so exists.

At the same time, Smyth detailed a case where canola researchers could achieve a 20 per cent yield bump immediately with a gene-edited variety, but because it would be treated as a “plant with novel traits” (PNT), they opted to introduce that bump at five per cent per year over four years specifically to avoid GMO-related regulatory costs that would otherwise apply.

In a recent survey of Canadian plant breeders, Smyth says 42 per cent of respondents have had at least one research proposal turned down because of uncertainty about the regulatory costs associated with developing a plant with novel traits. One-third also indicated experiencing notable delays in commercializing a PNT in Canada, compared to other political jurisdictions. Eighty-eight per cent of respondents believe the country’s PNT regulations need to be updated to reflect advances in scientific knowledge.

“Virtually all of our key competitive countries have moved in a direction that gives them a distinct advantage (in plant innovation),” says Smyth. “I think it’s very important that Canada step-up very quickly.”

The sheer cost of commercializing a PNT is an even more significant issue for less widely grown horticultural crops, says Michael Pautler, head of genomic services at Platform Genetics Inc., a sub-company of the Vineland Research and Innovation Centre.

Because of the investment exodus occurring in Europe, Pautler says European Union companies looking for new horticultural crops have been increasingly working with Vineland. Lucrative as this has been for the research institution, however, new varieties are developed through mutagenesis, a process that uses radiation to produce potentially beneficial genetic mutations. It is not considered a GMO-regulated technology.

Gene-editing is only used to identify what specific changes the researchers should look for, says Pautler.

Even if gene-editing could be the sole method used to support their European clients, Canadian regulatory costs amounting to tens of millions of dollars don’t make sense for crops with comparatively small grower markets.

“You can’t spend $150 million to bring a transgenic petunia to market in a crop worth $150 million a year globally,” Pautler says.

Livestock situation more complex yet

Complex as the plant world is, gene-edited animals bring things to another level – both in terms of challenges and problem-solving potential.

Michael Lohuis, vice-president of research and innovation for Semex, says the greater proliferation and diversity of polled (hornless) cattle, just as one example, offer direct financial savings and safety implications for farmers – as well as improved animal welfare by removing the need for a medical procedure. Developing polled cattle with gene-editing technology is a faster and potentially cheaper commercialization route for breeders, he says, and one that would eliminate substantial inbreeding concerns given current polled dairy cattle lines comprise a mere fraction of Canada’s cattle herd.

But like the development of gene-edited plants, uncertain regulatory timelines and costs are significant barriers. Other concerns include animal containment issues during technology development, potential supply chain segregation, labeling, contradictory public perceptions on the technology, and a vast array of further regulatory and supply chain challenges.

“Small to medium-sized companies, we’re really in a tight spot,” says Lohuis.

“We want to be able to control our food supply domestically [and] be able to compete on an export level with more efficiently produced products.”

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The objectives, required by Congress under the “fast-track” trade negotiating authority law, seek to reduce or eliminate EU tariffs on U.S. farm products and break down non-tariff barriers, including on products developed through biotechnology, the U.S. Trade Representative’s (USTR) office said.

EU trade commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom told U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer in Washington on Wednesday that the 28-country bloc could not negotiate on agriculture.

“We have made very clear agriculture will not be included,” Malmstrom told reporters after meeting Lighthizer, adding that the two sides had not yet agreed on the scope of the talks.

Europe has been seeking more limited negotiations to cut tariffs on industrial goods, including autos, since last July, when U.S. President Donald Trump and EU president Jean-Claude Juncker agreed to start negotiations.

Trump is considering levying tariffs on imported motor vehicles and auto parts of around 25 per cent on national security grounds, but has agreed to refrain from imposing such duties on European car imports while negotiations are underway.

He has long complained about Europe’s 10 per cent import tariff on autos. The U.S. passenger car tariff is only 2.5 per cent, although U.S. tariffs on pickup trucks and other commercial trucks are 25 per cent.

— Reporting for Reuters by David Lawder.

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It should also mean that Ontario growers will see quicker-developed varieties with traits like fusarium head blight resistance.

Wheat’s genome was finally sequenced earlier this year by a global project called the International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium (IWGSC) and made freely available.

Why it matters: Wheat has lagged behind in speed of trait development compared to other crops like corn and soybeans.

Wheat is responsible for about 20 per cent of the calories consumed in the world, Andrew Sharpe told the recent Grow Canada conference in Ottawa. Sharpe is director of genomics and bioinformatics at the Global Institute for Food Security (GIFS) at the University of Saskatchewan. He co-led Canada’s contribution to the global wheat genome sequencing project with Curtis Pozniak, researcher and wheat breeder at the Crop Development Centre in the University of Saskatchewan’s College of Agriculture and Bioresources.

There are good reasons why the wheat genome has taken so long to sequence. Firstly, it doesn’t have the private-sector research push of crops like corn and soybeans, and secondly, the genome is gigantic, compared to other species.

It is, for example five times larger than the human genome. As a result, it has taken 13 years and more than 200 scientists from 73 research institutions in 20 countries working through the International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium (IWGSC).

The journal Science published the highest quality wheat genome sequence in August.

The wheat genome is also more complex than other species, said Sharpe.

“The wheat genome is composed of very similar DNA repeats nested in one another, like a set of Russian dolls,” he said.

A breakthrough in algorithmic assessment ability also helped the researchers get to the full map. Israeli company NRGene has technology that made the billion-piece puzzle a million pieces, and then that million-piece puzzle a thousand pieces, he said.

A new project, started last year, called the 10+ Wheat Genomes Project, led by Pozniak, is a global effort to sequence the 10 most-grown wheat varieties around the world.

Agronomic and consumer implications

“Corn and soybeans have certainly seen bigger gains in development than wheat has,” said Ellen Sparry, general manager of C&M Seeds, an Ontario seed company focused on wheat. “Part of that is that they’ve been sequenced.”

The genome is like a map so breeders and researchers can return to areas of the genome that are known to affect different traits, making the breeding process more efficient. It can also help understand how genes affect each other.

It takes 12 to 15 years to develop a new variety of wheat through to commercialization, said Joanna Follings, cereals specialist for the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs. That time could be cut by a third now that the genome has been sequenced, she said.

The mapping of the genome means that more efficient decisions can be made on crosses while breeding new wheat varieties.

Sharpe said that understanding the genome also means that gene editing will be possible, but the technology has not been accepted around the world. Most countries are still sorting through how it will be regulated. Gene edits involve turning on and off genes within a plant, compared to adding in genes as is done in standard genetic modification.

There is potential for faster development in both agronomic and customer-appreciated traits, said Sparry.

A gene for stem thickness has already been identified, she said, which could lead to better ability to breed for resistance to lodging in wheat.

Follings said managing an increasing amount of disease, insect and weather damage, some due to climate change, could be helped by having a quicker ability to breed resistance into the cereal crop.

C&M Seeds has been a leader in finding markets for novel wheats, and also sees potential in consumer-focused traits that can be better targeted now that the genome is known, said Sparry.

Proteins could more easily be targeted to help people with gluten-tolerance issues. Other options could be higher fibre wheats.

“We would love to participate in any of that when it happens and bring value to the value chain,” she said.

Both Follings and Sparry said that the genome sequencing is another tool in the toolbox of the breeder. There are no wheat lines developed using genetic modification, so unless consumer preferences change, conventional breeding will be needed to carry out the crosses to get the desired traits to commercialization. But with the genome now known, those traits can be identified and crossed into production more quickly than ever before.

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