When your Non-GM products contain GM - Supermarkets must act!
The row over the enforced use of non-GM feed in the poultry sector is likely to come to a head this year.
High protein (hipro) soya meal typically makes up between 10 and 25 per cent of a poultry diet. Soya is the most widely used, suitable and cost effective protein source currently available for use in poultry diets. But with soya growers in the Americas growing more and more GM varieties, it will become increasingly difficult to source the non-GM soya needed to produce the non-GM feed that egg producers and others in the poultry sector are still required to use by many leading supermarkets.
Ironically, the non-GM feed demanded by major retailers is not actually GM free. Many casual observers may assume that non-GM means a complete absence of GM material, but under European Union legislation non-GM soya is permitted to contain up to 0.9 per cent unintentional GM contamination. This allowance is intended to reflect the assumption that reasonable precautions should have been taken to prevent GM contamination. However, it means that non-GM soya is not necessarily GM free.
Even with this permitted allowance, non-GM soya is becoming increasingly difficult to obtain. The UK poultry industry was instructed through retail supply chains to source soya only from Brazil, and only from dedicated supply chains intended to be clear of GM contamination - supply chains thoroughly audited by third party auditors. But more and more soya grown in Brazil is GM. In global terms the market for non-GM soya is small. The UK’s total requirement for hipro soya meal is approximately two million tonnes per annum, of which 800,000 tonnes is non-GM. There are also pockets of small demand in certain other EU states, but this is in comparison to an expectation that Brazil will grow 82 million tonnes of soya this year.
The demand for non-GM soya will fall this year by another five per cent to just 10 per cent and it is proving harder, or even impossible, to segregate non-GM from GM. Tests on soya in the UK are increasingly showing more than 0.9 per cent GM contamination. Some results have shown as much as 30 per cent and 40 per cent GM content in non-GM soya. At these levels of contamination non-GM soya is very clearly not GM free. And, when you consider that non-GM feed can also contain oils, amino acids, enzymes and vitamins with GM content, the non-GM feed that retailers insist on egg producers using is not GM free at all.
Despite this, egg producers will continue having to pay a heavy price for its use - a premium now of up to £100 per tonne, or 20 per cent, over standard feed - until supermarkets abandon a requirement that they impose on no other livestock sector in the UK. Asda and Morrison's have dropped the restriction, but the poultry sector is still waiting for the other major retailers to follow their lead. Unless they do so, farmers cannot start feeding their poultry with normal feed. In the case of egg producers, their eggs go into packing stations and they cannot guarantee that their eggs will only be sold by Asda or Morrisons.
In the mean time the difficulties for egg producers seem set to increase. In 2012 one importer of non-GM soya stopped importing it because it could not guarantee its non-GM status. This year the largest importer of non-GM soya will not be importing it. This importer, too, has said it could no longer guarantee its non-GM status. There will be insufficient non-GM soya to satisfy the UK’s demand, rationing will take place, so some supply chains will have to convert. And as less non-GM soya is planted, the premium the poultry sector has to pay for non-GM feed will increase exponentially.
Campaign groups and newspapers have portrayed GM as `Frankenstein food’, suggesting it is potentially unsafe and inadequately tested, so UK retailers have been keen to protect their reputations. But when GM soya is fed to livestock, the GM marker gene is not detectable in the meat or products, so is not detectable in chicken meat or in eggs.
In all likelihood the non-GM diets used by poultry farmers are GM and have been GM for many years. Egg producers continue to pay a premium for non-GM feed that they know is not non-GM at all. And this is happening at a time when the UK's free range egg producers are struggling with losses due to the high cost of feed.
