Whither water?

Want to know how dry it is in central western Ontario? Ask a farmer, or Dwight Boyd, senior water resources engineer for the Grand River Conservation Authority, based in Cambridge.

Boyd keeps tabs on a watershed 120 miles long, from its source near Dundalk, in Grey county near Georgian Bay, to the river's mouth at Port Maitland on Lake Erie, encompassing 2,600 square miles.

"It's a severe drought; that is what the numbers are suggesting," Boyd says. The Grand River was already running low in mid-May.

Precipitation over the last 22 months is 30 per cent below normal, a report to the GRCA board in mid-April said.

The 32 stream gauges on the Grand River and its tributaries suggested conditions were no better a month later. Late-May water levels were "what you would expect as late July conditions," Boyd says.

Boyd looks at the long-term precipitation records. Continuous records of rainfall at Guelph have been kept since 1900, with some records going back to 1882. Brantford has data going back that far as well.

The dry spell has been going on for some time, Boyd notes. Only one month in the last 14 had precipitation above average. That was January, and those heavy snowfalls didn't hang around, nor did they melt and fill the authority's reservoirs, where water is held behind six major dams. A month of mild weather in what should have been mid-winter allowed the snow pack to escape. Some went into the ground, but a lot, about 40 per cent, went into the air through evaporation, Boyd says.

Then there was less rainfall than normal in March, April and May. "We had less water to start with," he says, citing a report to the authority board made last November. The drought - and he uses that term advisedly - has been continuing now for 18 months. People get antsy about the term drought, he says. "It means different things to different people.

"We are drier now than in the '60s," he says, referring to the last serious, long-term dry spell. At Guelph, precipitation records indicate that it is as dry now as it was in the 1930s.

One of Boyd's jobs is to prevent floods. He also monitors Environment Canada weather forecasts. The current thinking is that the jet stream - the huge flows of air high above the earth's surface - has changed its normal pattern. Rather than keeping cooler air south of Lake Erie until summer, the jet stream has split into several streams, changing precipitation patterns. So some moisture-laden air from the Gulf of Mexico has been prevented from coming north.

Is this because of global warming? Boyd shrugs his shoulders. There's a major drought every 30 or 40 years, he says: "We had one in the '60s." - Don Stoneman

© copyright 1999 Agricultural Publishing Company Limited.


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H20 how-to

So what does all this mean to farmers? Shallow aquifers didn't get to recharge in the winter and spring, says Dwight Boyd. Shallow wells will dry up, and so will ponds and streams sustained by those aquifers. Farmers can check the status of drilled wells; by law, since the 1940s, every qualified well driller in Ontario has had to submit a copy of the drilling report to the Ministry of the Environment. For $20, a landowner can get a copy of the well report by calling 1-888-396-9355. Then the landowner can get the well checked to see where current water levels are.

A decline could be the first warning that there's a problem that demands backing off on consumption.

There are instruments available that will check how deep the water is in a drilled well, but they aren't cheap, says Jamie Connelly, Hamilton-based senior hydrogeologist for the Ontario Ministry of the Environment.

Farmers concerned about wells that supply water to livestock can measure dug or bored wells using a flashlight - even a weight on a string and then listening carefully for the "plop" as the weight hits water. Even a drilled well that is 100 feet deep will likely have water within 40 feet of the surface, Connelly says.

For long-term weather outlooks, see the Environment Canada Climate Outlook at www.cmc.ec.gc.ca/climate/climate_outlook.htm

© copyright 1999 Agricultural Publishing Company Limited.


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Vitamin fix snafu

The ink was barely dry on Middlesex pork producer Rein Minnema's $35-million class action lawsuit against four companies for price fixing lysine, when an even bigger scam hit the headlines. This one involves price fixing vitamins, which are used in all animal feeds, not only pigs, as well as consumer products from breakfast cereal to the milk poured over it.

Late last month, Swiss pharmaceutical giant F. Hoffman-La Roche and German chemical conglomerate BASF, two major producers in the US$16-billion world vitamin industry, were slapped with the largest criminal fine in U.S. history: US$725 million, more than C$1 billion. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the two companies pled guilty in U.S. district court in Dallas to leading a worldwide conspiracy to fix prices and allocate market shares for certain vitamins, including A, B2, B5, C, and E, between 1990 and 1999.

Archer Daniels Midland, which pled guilty to fixing lysine (a pig feed ingredient) in 1997, has already paid $156 million in U.S. and Canadian fines. The four companies involved in the lysine case have already paid US$200 million in civil suits, and U.S. lawyers are reportedly hard at work already in the vitamin case, with feed companies and farmers lining up for damages.

Like lysine, vitamins amount to pennies per tonne of livestock feed, but over a whole industry add up to untold millions. BASF and Roche, whose top executive faces a US$100,000 fine and four-month jail term, now brace for a flurry of litigation as well.

The story sounds like a rerun of the lysine case: executives meeting and agreeing to fix prices and allocate volume of sales and market share. Whereas the lysine case hinged on insider information from an FBI mole, in the vitamin scam, Rhone-Poulenc, another conspirator in the vitamin cartel, agreed to disclose information in return for leniency.

The impact in Ontario is difficult to gauge, though it's clear farmers overpaid for vitamins, which local suppliers buy in from the U.S. How much is more difficult to determine. A report in the Toronto Star pegs the Canadian livestock vitamin market at $250 million a year. In Ottawa, Competition Bureau of Canada spokesperson Cecile Suchal confirms an investigation is underway.

The Ontario feed industry, which has been rebated for lysine overpayments, is bracing for calls from Minnema's lawyers to tackle the thorny question of compensating farmers. Time will tell whether another Rein Minnema seeks compensation for the vitamin fraud.

BASF spokesman John Gilardi at corporate headquarters in Ludwigshafen, Germany, says a number of lawsuits have been launched, and the company is seeking to resolve them as quickly as possible. "We sincerely regret the incident, and are working to instruct our employees about the rules of competition in various countries around the world. We have made changes in management to give our global vitamin business a new beginning," Gilardi says. Joel Klein, assistant attorney general in charge of the antitrust division of the U.S. Department of Justice, said "This conspiracy has affected more than $5 billion of commerce in products found in every American household." U.S. investigators have cast their net wide in their ongoing investigations; there have already been nine prosecutions. In March, another Swiss vitamin maker, Lonza AG, agreed to pay a US$10.5-million fine for price fixing niacin and niacinamide, part of the B-complex group. Five executives with DuCoa - a joint venture of DuPont and ConAgra - and Toronto-based Chinook Group, pled guilty to price fixing choline chloride, or vitamin B4, also used in animal feed.

Minnema says he isn't surprised by the news of the vitamin scam. He will meet with the Ontario Federation of Agriculture executive June 15 to seek support for his lysine battle. Minnema was buoyed recently by letters of support from the Canadian Pork Council and the Lambton and Middlesex pork producers associations. - John Muggeridge

© copyright 1999 Agricultural Publishing Company Limited.


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Money flows in Ontario

When it comes to disaster relief, Ontario farmers are faring better than their colleagues in other provinces. "We've got $18 million out the door," says David Hope, director of policy analysis with the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs.

At the same time, producers in provinces such as Manitoba and Saskatchewan are complaining loudly. There, the federal government's Agricultural Income Disaster Assistance (AIDA) program is administered by federal bureaucrats and despite the fact producers received their application forms in March, they had received just $500,000 by mid May.

Furthermore, producers in those provinces only receive 70 per cent of the money claimed due to a hold-back stipulation condition which has been applied to ensure federal program disbursements can be pro-rated later if funding is inadequate. The hold-back requirement has hit Ontario applicants too, but producers here receive 82 per cent because of money kicked in by the province.

By May 12, 3,383 farmers had applied for the Ontario Whole Farm Relief Program announced in December. Officials have issued 2,175 cheques totaling $17.8 million. In Ontario, where AIDA is administered by the province, producers returned 70 applications for the federal program within a week of the forms being mailed out during the second week of May.

In provinces where the federal government administers AIDA directly, farmers had submitted about 1,400 applications. Only 35 claims had been processed.

Saskatchewan farmers returned most of those, while a few came from Manitoba and one from Newfoundland.

Six hundred Ontario producers have had their applications declined. One of the most common reasons was negative margins, but even those were fewer than originally feared by farm leaders.

Ontario producers who had expanded or had a major accrual change were eventually allowed to resubmit a modified accrual calculation. "That made some people eligible for a greater payout than otherwise," Hope explains. The other leading reason for being declined was claims less than $1,000.

Hope says some of these applicants will ultimately qualify when they apply for the federal program. He explains that Ontario set the cutoff because in some cases those farmers could have ended up having to repay amounts received if they had subsequently applied for AIDA money, which reduces payouts by an amount equivalent to their allowable Net Income Stabilization Account (NISA) contribution.

In the case of a producer with eligible net sales of $100,000, who is entitled to collect $20,000 in disaster relief funds, the payout would be reduced by three per cent to $17,000. The small number of farmers who have opted out of NISA will still be subject to the same calculation and deductions.

Federal officials decided recently to extend the original June 15 AIDA deadline for submitting applications to match Ontario's, which remains July 31. - Robert Irwin

© copyright 1999 Agricultural Publishing Company Limited.


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Bias-free biotech

With biotech foes and advocates squaring off in the media, consumers and farmers alike can face an uphill battle sorting out the rhetorical from the anecdotal and the scientific.

Help is but a phone call away now, though, with the late-April launch of a toll-free hotline courtesy of the Food Biotechnology Communications Network (FBCN).

Individuals who want information on issues such as food biotechnology can call registered dietitian Julie Lacasse weekdays between 11 a.m. and 7 p.m. EDT. After hours or when the line is busy, callers can leave a message for return calls.

Based in Calgary, the bilingual Lacasse says while she doesn't have the answer to every conceivable question on possible risks associated with food that may contain genetically modified organisms (GMOs), her 14 years' experience as a dietitian does allow her to present the facts as they pertain to nutrition and her knowledge of proper scientific inquiry. When she's stumped by a question, she'll pass the query along to an expert scientific authority.

Calls spike when anti-GMO or biotech media coverage makes big news, such as CBC Radio's recent series Field of Genes, says Lacasse. People dismiss the science that goes into approving biotech food at those times: "Callers forget all that and report anecdotal stories, and dismiss any potential for the technology." Lacasse says she tries to point to the checks and balances in the approval process, but says it appears many callers "have lost faith" in the regulatory system - partly, she suspects, because of Britain's handling of BSE/mad cow disease.

FBCN is a national not-for-profit association whose goal is to encourage public interest in and access to information on the biotech industry, says executive director Diane Wetherall, based in Guelph. Funded through fees paid to attend workshops on biotech agriculture, by industry players, plus commodity boards, individuals and a grant from the Agrifood Trade 2000 program, the organization also produces a booklet that outlines biotech developments, which crops are approved and how, says Wetherall. Biotech stakeholders such as Monsanto and Pioneer, food giant Nestlé, and the Canadian Council of Grocery Distributors (CCGD) - which includes national grocery chains - are backers.

Wetherall is firm in confirming FBCN's mandate as a balanced resource for the presentation of both good science and contrary opinion, not a biased front for its backers.

The organization's web site bears out that balance. In the wake of Nature magazine's late May report on preliminary findings of Cornell University research linking the death of Monarch butterfly larvae to exposure to pollen from Bt maize being dusted on milkweed, the site included the diverse views of an Environment Canada scientist, a Canadian Environmental Law Association lawyer, biotech critic Jeremy Rifkin, and University of Toronto Monarch specialist David Gibo.

Wetherall says FBCN is publicizing the toll-free line this month by distributing shopping list pads through CCGD-member stores and placing information in consumer magazines such as Canadian Living. A national media tour publicizing the effort took place late April. - Richard Charteris

© copyright 1999 Agricultural Publishing Company Limited.


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