Canola affected by blackleg fungus
Canola farmers across Canada are urging the federal government to do something about China’s decision to ban the import of Canadian Canola seed used to make vegetable oil. China has said that it will block Canadian Canola seed as of November 15th unless unless there is a certificate proving that the canola is free of the blackleg fungus.
Blackleg fungus is seed-borne and can be spread by the wind and infected crop material. It causes lesions and stem cankers which lead to premature ripening or just a plain collapse of the crop. While this is detrimental to the farmer, the fungus affects only the plant; it does not affect canola seeds that are pressed to make oil.
According to the Saskatchewan Agriculture’s website, blackleg fungus was first found in 1975. Since then, it has spread to about half of all the canola farms surveyed (as of January 2009).
This is significant, especially when one considers that this crop was worth over $5 billion dollars to Saskatchewan last year with China being the biggest importer.
Blackleg fungus could easily be eradicated if farmers would stick to a four year rotation plan (3 years between successive crops) in order to let the fungus die out naturally. In 1991, R.K. Gugel and G.A. Petrie wrote a paper outlining their findings and said that farmers must think of the crop in a holistic way because the fungus will win out over any type of “resistant” type of canola. Pesticides aren’t the answer either.
Interestingly enough, China has had a record domestic production of rapeseed oil this year. According to ABC Rural:
Almost a third of Canada’s export canola seed went to China last year, and its departure from the market leaves Canada with about 6 million tonnes of canola to sell into global markets.
The excess grain will compete with Australian canola about to come onto the market as harvest gets underway across the country.
Claire Sullivan, from GrainPool, says there’s speculation that the move comes as Chinese authorities try to whittle down soy stockpiles.
“The word from some of the commentary I’ve been hearing is that the Chinese Government is offering some subsidies to domestic producers to work through some of those state stocks at the moment,” she says.
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Countries (and States) are often eager to come up with excuses like this (legitimate or otherwise) to block imports from other countries to favor their own markets.
I’m not familiar with this disease or the agronomics of growing rapeseed but it may be pretty challenging to grow other crops during the 3 year rotation – at least to farmers who may not have the experience, equipment and local infrastructure required. Although rotation does sound like an easy fix…
I don’t know about Canada, but the last time I paid attention to U.S. subsidies, farmers were pretty much required to grow ONLY corn and soybean because their payoffs were based on their average corn/soybean yields over a multiyear period – so if you grew corn once in 4 years, you’d be covered for only that 1/4.
Thanks for your input – that’s good to know.