Canola Council of Canada welcomes CUSMA panel decision regarding GE corn exports to Mexico

Jan 09, 2025

The Canola Council of Canada (CCC) welcomes the decision by the dispute settlement panel initiated by the U.S. under the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) regarding a ban on genetically engineered (GE) corn in dough and tortillas and the gradual substitution of GE corn used for animal feed and industrially for human consumption.

The panel concluded that measures taken by Mexico were inconsistent with a number of provisions in CUSMA and recommends that Mexico bring its measures into conformity with obligations of the agreement.

“We are pleased to see that the CUSMA dispute panel has reaffirmed the commitment to science- and evidence-based policies that are required to help ensure predictable trade and market access in the North American market,” says Chris Davison, CCC president & CEO. “We supported Canada joining this dispute as a third party and welcome the outcome of this process.”

Mexico is an important market for Canadian canola and canola products with exports totaling approximately $1 billion in 2023. Mexico gains MXN $21.9 billion in economic benefits annually from imports of Canadian canola.

Source : Canola Council

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids