The Green Fork is the official blog of the Eat Well Guide. Click here to Find Good Food.

At a time of year when many of us are thinking about giving fancy sweets to loved ones, there’s a lot going on with beet sugar. Emily Fudakowski fills us in on what’s happening up north.

Montreal based sugar processing giant Rogers/Lantic will soon decide if it will accept GM sugar beet from Alberta farmers for the first time this year. With this move, Rogers/Lantic would lose the distinction of being the last GMO-Free sugar processing plant in North America. (Canadian GM sugar beet is currently processed in the U.S by Michigan Sugar.) This decision will have major implications for organic farming.

Organic farmers would suffer a huge setback if GM sugar beet crops are grown commercially. Sugar beet is wind-pollinated so the potential for cross-contamination with other crops is staggering. Organic crops including chard, conventional sugar beet and table varieties will inevitably be contaminated by Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide-resistant sugar beet if they are in close proximity to GM sugar beet monocrops. Ultimately, organic crops would no longer be organic.

Tom Stearns, president of High Mowing Seeds in Vermont, spoke at the Guelph Organic Conference in January. Along with the Organic Seed Alliance, the Center for Food Safety and the Sierra Club, Tom joined in filing a lawsuit in early 2008 against the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency of the USDA, which challenged the approval of GM sugar beet and sought a more transparent, democratic approval process with thorough assessment of the environmental, health and economic impacts.

“GM sugar beet poses a grave threat to organic farmers and to all of those who want to know what they are eating,” said Stearns. “There are much better forms of progress that our agriculture can take than coming up with a crude technological fix that allows us to continue farming in unsustainable ways.” Hopefully the approval of GM sugar beet will take the same path here in Canada. To give Canadians a sweet (but GMO-sugar free) Valentine by sending a note to Edward Malkin, the president of Lantic, Inc., visit Canadian Biotechnology Action Network.

In addition to populating the Eat Well Guide with Canadian listings, Emily Fudakowski is an outreach consultant for Beyond Factory Farming in Canada. Emily is a Sociology and Geography graduate of Carleton University, who reccently returned from teaching and travelling in Asia. She lives in Ottawa where she attempts to create spectactular variations of Asian dishes with local ingredients.