Agriculture Committee on Feb. 9th, 2011

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Mr. Raizada, you were nodding your head.

[Dr. Manish N. Raizada]

Could I just suggest that on the transparency issue, when Monsanto issues a patent, that's a public record. It's a very detailed, wonderful public record, and it's very rigorous. I would suggest that to improve transparency, that public record, that patent, should be linked to a database. It's out there, and it's very detailed.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Mr. Hoback, you have the last five minutes.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, gentlemen, for coming here this morning. I apologize for my tardiness. The flight here from Ottawa this morning took a little bit longer than we expected, so I apologize to Dean Emes for missing his presentation. I look forward to reading it later on.

First of all, we've already beat up low-level presence. At every meeting we go to, everybody says low-level presence needs to be addressed. I think the minister understands that, and I think the Europeans are starting to understand that. I think there are minds smarter than mine that are going to decide what that low-level presence should be, but I understand that's something everybody has identified as something that needs to be worked on, on a global basis.

I'm kind of curious about a couple of things. First of all, it seems that a study on biotechnology always turns into a GMO study. That's unfortunate, because GMO, as Wayne said, is one tool in the tool box, yet we're going to see new technologies, like genomics and other ideas, coming forward, which could produce exactly the same traits you're getting through GMO. For example, I wonder what the response would be if we used genomics to make alfalfa Roundup resistant instead of a GMO. Would that be there?

In fact, there are some people in the ministry who are telling me that once some of the patents come off on the GMO side for Monsanto, the people who are opposed to GMOs will all of a sudden not have a problem with them, and that it's more of an anti-Monsanto trait than anything.

It's unfortunate that, as you said, Mr. Penner, that is a reality that you live in and have to deal with it.

Wayne touched on something that I think is important, which is the communications through the regulatory process. In Saskatoon, we saw how they did their cuts in the petri dish and took those through to get the traits, which was interesting. It seems to me that the regulatory system is very closed and controlled. Is that a fair comment? So before a new product even goes into commercialization, we've gone to the regulatory system in a very closed environment so that there's no threat of contamination from outside. Is that a fair comment?

[Dr. Manish N. Raizada]

Yes.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

Okay. If we do that for regulation, what is the purpose of registration then? In western Canada we go through regulations, and again we acquire that data set. We do all that work, and we basically come across and say, “Hey, this is fair. This is safe. There's no problem here.” But then we go to a second panel for registration, which is a two-year process that now selects the variety based on whether it is profitable or on other non-science-based information. Is that process still effective? Is it still needed?

Mr. Ingratta, with your experience, what would be your opinion on that?

[Dr. Frank Ingratta]

The registration process is somewhat separate, like your series of field trials, to demonstrate that in fact it is better. We traditionally follow not only consumer protection, but also a pattern of ensuring that it's better than what currently exists. So the registration process, if you will, assists in a time to demonstrate that not only is it resistant to herbicide X, but it is in fact better and more productive than what currently exists.

I wouldn't want to shelve the registration process in its entirety, but if there were an opportunity to streamline it or have it concurrent with other processes, that might be the solution you'd be looking for.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

That's an interesting comment, because that's what I heard from some of the researchers. They were saying the same thing. They didn't want to see the registration process disappear, but they thought there was data they gathered during the regulation process that they could utilize and streamline the registration process.

Mr. McGuire.

[Mike McGuire]

I think a good example is corn. In corn, variety registration ceased several years ago, probably about 10 years ago. We aren't registering varieties. The school of thought there was that companies are going to be motivated to bring out better varieties; if they brought out a lesser variety, they wouldn't last very long.

So what we committed to do as an industry...we would not have to enter corn varieties into registration trials, but the industry committed to entering into performance trials so the growers had the data from a third party and everyone could see how these products performed. It's a good assumption: companies will bring out better products because that's what they want to do. But then we agreed as an industry to jointly test them to provide growers with third-party data.

I think that's a good system. I think that's one that's worth looking at, because it didn't delay the introduction of new products. Canadian growers wanted access to those same corn hybrids at the same time that the guy in Michigan had them--where they didn't have a registration process. So it brought us improved products faster and made us parallel with the U.S., but it had integrated into it the ability to have performance data to make sure we were doing what we were saying we were doing.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

You're out of time, Mr. Hoback, believe it or not. Did you have a closing comment? You do have about 10 seconds left.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

The last place I was going to go was the one per cent of research in China, but I guess as a closing comment I'll say that we've just seen the Canadian Wheat Board decide to spend money on lakers instead of putting it back into research. I was going to ask if you thought that was a wise use of money, considering the deficit we have in cereals as far as research is concerned and the deficit we see in the advances in growing wheat and barley compared to what we're seeing in canola or corn or other crops, but....

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Maybe you can ask them that when you're thanking them for coming here.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you very much to all our witnesses. We really appreciate it. The time is never enough, but I'm sure we know how to find you. If we have particular questions, we can do that. Thanks again.

We're going to recess for five minutes.

We'll ask the witnesses to please leave the table. We have some new witnesses coming in.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thanks, gentlemen, for being here today.

With no further ado, we will move into presentations. We'll have Mr. Rowe, president and chief executive officer of Nutrasource Diagnostics Inc., for 10 minutes or less, please.

[William J. Rowe, President and Chief Executive Officer, Nutrasource Diagnostics Inc.]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. And thanks to the panel for having me out to speak. I appreciate it.

Most of you likely have not heard of us or our company. Just to give you some brief background, at risk of sounding like an infomercial, which I don't want to do, we're a contract research organization founded in 2002. We've been federally incorporated since then. We have four divisions at our company: a human clinical trials division, a product analytics division, a human diagnostic division, and a regulatory consulting division. It's important to note that we don't do any work with pharmaceuticals. We do only human-based work on non-pharmaceutical, active ingredients used in the food, beverage, cosmetic, and natural health product sectors.

We've been involved in whole or in part with approximately 250 Health Canada-approved health claims across those categories. Sometimes we're doing the entire process for the sponsor; sometimes we're doing a small part of it. We've been involved with roughly 250 of these.

One of the key topics I was asked to speak on was whether the federal government should fund research in Canada in the agritech/agrifood sector, and how should it be funded? I'm going to speak to that today.

Interestingly, alongside this, in March 2009, Health Canada published a food health claim relationship monograph. It was intended for food and beverage companies and agriculture and agrifood companies so that they could look at how they could substantiate a health claim for their products. What we're talking about is the direct interface between a product and the consumer.

AAFC, in response to this monograph, came out with an RFP through the MERX system. There were six of these RFPs, and as part of the response to the RFPs, we were asked, as one of the bidders, to put in place our decision tree for choosing which six sectors we were going to concentrate on and how did those six sectors relate to the body of evidence in the literature.

We won five of those six RFPs. We have long since completed those. Two of those six have gone to expert panel review, and one of the two, thus far, may have some really interesting new health claims associated with the product area.

When we conduct a systematic review, what we do is look at the entire body of evidence out there. We establish parameters for the inclusion and exclusion criteria for choosing the publications that will be used to substantiate the claim. We then determine which ones will be used and why. In one particular instance, using our criteria for which publications were going to be used for the five groups we were looking at, this is what happened. After title, abstract, and full-text filtering of 14,658 unique references on this particular agrisector category, which is a significant one for the agriculture sector in Canada, we were able to use 59 publications. That was after having started with 14,000. There were 45 intervention studies, one observational study, and 13 meta-analyses, which are systematic reviews or authoritative statements. These are documents that are in the public domain.

When you look at that, there are roughly 14,600 studies that, from a Health Canada health claim substantiation perspective, are unusable, and from an AAFC perspective, based on the monograph, are unusable. So it really comes down to what the expectation of outputs are for AAFC, for Health Canada, and for the Government of Canada.

To me, in terms of how research is funded, the reason so many of these studies were rejected was that they were not powered properly. For instance, if you want to power a study properly for cholesterol lowering, you need two groups, minimally, for a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial, and you need 45 subjects. If you don't have 45 subjects, it won't produce statistical significance. You don't have a publication, and you don't have good stats in terms of proving a health claim relationship between a particular food and cholesterol lowering.

They didn't have enough subjects. They didn't have enough groups. The end point they were looking at wasn't reflected in the duration of the trial. For all these reasons, we see time and time again lots of good money chasing after flawed trial design.

From our perspective, as it relates to AAFC and Health Canada and growing agrifood sectors across the country, there are two key opportunities that work synergistically.

The first one is the health claim opportunity. I can tell you first-hand that when Health Canada puts a stamp on a substantiated health claim for a Canadian product that's tied to Canadian agriculture, it improves market share domestically and internationally. I've had tons of feedback from multinationals all the way down to very small companies in this regard. To me, that's a key output.

Oftentimes, taxpayers' money goes to fund trials through various mechanisms that are designed in a flawed way that won't even produce the results. Even if they're favourable or positively trending results, it won't produce the results to substantiate a claim to get Health Canada's approval. That is a big flawed area in terms of a gap analysis.

The second is the intellectual property that's produced. It's often very difficult for food and beverage companies to get intellectual property around a formula in this industry. Where they can get some IP protection is on source, which goes back to livestock and crop. Tied to their source, and unique sources, product-specific data is incredibly important for IP protection in order for them to grow their sector and market share domestically and internationally. They can do that through a health claim.

In terms of patent filings, and trademark filings around brands, this is where you think of the Millennium asparagus crop as one where you could potentially tie specific outcomes to a substantiated Canadian agrifood sector and turn that into a domestic and international growth story for that market group.

For me, as it relates to all of this, if the Government of Canada is interested in these two opportunities and interested in these outputs as a tangible outcome from funding research through Health Canada and AAFC dollars, there has to be a threshold for minimum trial design, or time and time again you end up with the scenario that I've outlined above. This isn't one that I picked out of many; this situation occurred across all five areas we looked at on behalf of AAFC.

However, if the Government of Canada is interested in basic investigative research with no parameters on trial design in terms of the commercialization pathway, very early investigative work exclusively, which is how the funding model is set up now, whether it's funded through marketing boards, growers' groups, or university-based or university quasi-based organizations and associations, then the status quo is sufficient.

If you're looking for these outputs specifically to enhance Canadian agriculture, there have to be some parameters around how these trials are designed. These are the ones that are published. Think of all the money that's gone into trials that journals have rejected because they're not properly designed. If you think of all that investment and what it's actually producing, I think the return on investment is far too low and could be a lot higher.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you very much, Mr. Rowe.

We now will move to the vice-president of the Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Growers' Association, Mr. John Kelly.

[Dr. John Kelly, Vice-President, Erie Innovations, Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Growers' Association]

Thank you, Chairman Miller.

I'm going to give you a little bit of background on myself first, because of the context of this morning's conversation. Previous to being with the Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Growers' Association, I was head of regulatory affairs and technical development for a major crop protection company. I also had responsibility, in another position, for commercialization and regulatory affairs for animal biotechnology, so if we want to get into those types of questions, we certainly can do that.

My comments today will focus on policy and on commercialization because that is where I think we need to go. The Erie innovation and commercialization initiative is a broadly supported regional effort, supported to transform some of the agricultural opportunities in southern Ontario, particularly within the sand plains where the tobacco belt is, and to try to diversify our agrifood opportunities down there. We're supported through a number of different organizations, through research and development organizations like the University of Guelph and the Vineland Research and Innovation Centre, through various governments like the adaptation council for Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, OMAFRA , and also regional governments like Norfolk County and Oxford Country. We also have significant industry support through the Alliance of Ontario Food Processors, apple growers' and fruit and vegetable growers' associations, tobacco growers, and asparagus growers.

I do want to thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today to provide some comment on biotechnology and the importance to the sector.

My comments will be referring to biotechnology as a technology within the biospace, and this will frame how I'm going to give my comments. I'll also refer to the way I see agriculture growing and how it has new opportunities in there, which we have to take advantage of to remain competitive.

We've come out of a manufacturing age. If you think about the 1950s to the 1980s, that's when the economy was based upon big business manufacturing like autos, the auto sector, and things like that. The 1990s to 2010 was the age of the IT sector. I believe we're going to the bio sector. We're now coming into the bio generation age, so a lot of those other sectors are going to be supported by agriculture, and these things are going to have a significant and distinct importance to the Canadian economy.

We will always be the purveyor of food, and high-quality, safe food. Our challenge within the sector is to be able to compete and to be able to compete internationally with products from different sources around the world. We've had references to China earlier. We also have to compete against California. We also have to compete against Chile with these types of things.

We also know that agriculture, beyond food, will be able to support the chemical industry. It will be able to support the energy sector as well as others.

For farmers, biotechnology means more choice and it means more benefit. It can be dealing with things like disease resistance, pest control, stress tolerance—drought stress, for example, was mentioned earlier—and increased yields. We're looking at delivering health benefits. One of the challenges we've had is that many of the traits we've had have been input traits, and we're just coming into the output traits sector. I'll refer to that in a few minutes.

We have innovation in farming. Biotechnology is just another type of innovation. When we look at the future of agriculture, there are basically three main areas. One is food and health, and we have lots of examples from biotechnology where food and health is part of it. We want to be able to meet nutritional requirements. We want to be able to document food safety, but we also want to move into the functional food and nutraceutical area, and we can do these things through output traits. The golden rice that Syngenta developed is an example of that, but there are others—delayed ripening, for example, and shipping of products. We can do these things much better.

On the bio-economy side of things, we can divide that into biofuels, whether it's bioethanol from starch base or cellulosic base; biodiesel from plants, algal base, restaurant greases, or animal base; biogas, and this comes from fermentation processes whether it's from agricultural co-products.... You'll notice that manure is a co-product. It's no longer a waste product, so you want to remove that vernacular from the way you think about these things. It's the same thing for municipal waste; we can use municipal waste to generate power. Biomass is another one, and it's going to be an important one for us if we're going to generate electricity at places like Nanticoke and Lafarge. There are torrefaction technologies. These need to be developed. Syngas is another where you have gasification of biomass immediately for the production of gas.

We'll also be able to develop biochemicals, and we currently do have a lot of biochemicals. If you look at the foam seats that you're sitting on, I'll bet they have soybeans in them. The development of hydroxylated fatty acids from castor is another example where we can move these things forward, but we have a problem with castor in that it has a compound called ricin. Well, I was talking to Frank about this earlier. We can silence that ricin gene so it doesn't express it. That's also a genetically modified product. Polylactic acid and polyhydroxyalkanoates plastics—PHA—also have a tremendous advantage for us. And that's just on the chemical side of things.

We look at fibre for the auto sector, furniture, decking; these are also things that can be enhanced from agricultural products. So we have food and health, we have the bio-economy; and the last part where we have a real excellent opportunity is in the environment, developing the carbon economy. Canada will play a huge role in the carbon economy and we need to be able to take advantage of it. The dedicated energy crops that are out there have more roots under the ground than they have plant above the ground, and that's a carbon sink and it's a carbon capture.

Water management is also another area where we will have some leadership, whether it's through conservation, resource management, or the development of drought-tolerant plant through biotechnology. So these are things that are opportunities for us.

We have to be able to support the entrepreneur, and we have to be able to support the application of science. So when we go to commercialize these types of things, we need to have programs that will support the developing entrepreneur. A couple of examples: we have a company called Naturally Norfolk. They have new drying technologies for these foods. They've been supported provincially. We need to find other ways to support them. And an example on the opposite side would be Bick's Pickles, which was bought by a U.S. company, and that Bick's plant is now closing in Canada. So how do we avoid these types of closings?

We need to promote the commercialization of innovation within Canada. Another product, stevia, was developed by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Jim Brandle in London. Well, guess where it was commercialized? In the United States. We need to be able to do these things here.

We have regulatory impacts that we need to address. We can talk about the Enviropig, if you'd like. The Enviropig is a genetically modified animal that reduces phosphate in the manure. We didn't have regulations to deal with that. That product is going to be commercialized in the United States first.

Smart regulations. I'm sure you are all familiar with Gaetan Lussier and what he did a few years ago. We need to enhance what he did. Cost of production and minimum wage standards--these all impact us even though they are not specifically biotechnology things. And we heard some discussions about the environmental regulations and setbacks this morning.

The next point is we also have to engage the consumer in biotechnology acceptance. Consumers are the driver of the economy. We have a changing demographic. We have an aging population. We also have a population that is growing in the ethnic sector. We're not supplying that ethnic sector. We should be. So when we look at the development of new products, like Asian vegetables, for example, like Indian kaddu or callaloo or red hot Chinese peppers, we should be doing those things.

We also are developing genetically modified crops that have enhanced omega-3 products. They say things in the United States about omega-3s that we can't say in Canada, and I'll give you the American Heart Association example, where they are overtly saying that we should have more omega-3s in the diet if you've had a cardiac event or a major cardiac event. So a recommendation for us, as well as Ag Canada, as well as other federal departments, including Health Canada, Environment Canada, Industry Canada, and NRCan, is to overtly support the adoption of these products when they're regulated. Not just say, yes, we think they're okay, but overtly support them and have them.

Biotechnology is good for farmers, it's good for the consumers, and it's good for the environment, in my opinion. We're seeing an increased acceptance of these products by the farming community, but we still have challenges with the consumer. And I was happy to hear the data that Mike Emes was describing this morning.

I have a couple more points. We do have to have industry at the table when we're developing these biotechnology regulations, and not just regulations but the way they're presented. We have to incent the industry to bring their processing capacity to Canada. We know we can do the extractions. We know we can do nutraceutical development. We have to find ways to actually support people to do these things.

We can grow the products. We have an excellent climate, particularly in southern Ontario, where there is a myriad of crops. I think there are more than 200 crops grown in southern Ontario.

How do we incent individuals and companies to get into the processing and the distribution of these products into existing markets? We already have the markets.

Policy is important. We do need to support the entrepreneur and innovation. Organizations like mine--Erie Innovation and Commercialization--and Bioenterprise, the Vineland Research and Innovation Centre, Soy 20/20, and Ontario Agri-Food Technologies need to be supported, because these are leading-edge companies that are supporting the entrepreneur and moving these things forward.

We need an expansion of the Growing Forward policy framework. Continued partnership with the Ontario government is important. We need to enhance the commercialization side of that. That will help with the biotechnology regulations. We need to develop risk management programs for crops that aren't currently grown here--for example, an insurance program for these dedicated energy crops we don't have currently.

We also need to support the growers. This could be through the offshore worker program. Currently in Ontario, the minimum wage standard has really impacted profitability and the ability of people to survive.

The last part I'll address is the importance of convergence across sectors. I'm on the board of directors of Life Sciences Ontario. On that board are people from the farm industry, the bioeconomy, the animal health business, agriculture, and environment, as well as lawyers and bankers and those types of folks. We're not just about feeding people. The food and health applications, the bioeconomy, the environmental ones...the issues that agriculture has are the same as those for most innovations. We like to invest in research and we like to see our research commercialized elsewhere. That's just the way it is.

It's difficult to build a sector based on innovation if funding doesn't exist to advance technology. When it's good research, it will find its way to the U.S., but we need to keep it here. We don't want to keep buying it back.

Harmonization in regulations has been addressed. I'm finishing—

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Yes.

[Dr. John Kelly]

So the message of LSO is simple: we need to work together.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you very much. Give my regards to my good friend Brian Gilroy.

[Dr. John Kelly]

I will.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Mr. Rothstein, from the University of Guelph.

[Dr. Steven Rothstein, Professor, Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, University of Guelph]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and I want to thank the committee for inviting me to present to you.

I also want to just briefly mention my background because it has a significant effect on the sort of research that we do. My first job was at Ciba-Geigy in North Carolina. It's now part of Syngenta. I then came to the University of Guelph as a faculty member. I had an industrial research chair that was partly funded by Pioneer Hi-Bred. Then I left the university and went to work at Pioneer itself in Iowa where I was research director for agronomic trades. Then I came back after they were bought by Dupont. I came back to the university as a faculty member again.

Since 2003 we've had an ongoing substantial collaboration with Syngenta that's going for at least another few years, probably longer. I want to point out that this is very rare to have this type of long-term collaboration with an industrial partner. The longevity is due to a combination of factors that I want to get to later.

Obviously we'd like to think it's partly due to our competence, but it also has to do with the availability of infrastructure as well as other aspects of funding that gives us flexibility in research that I'll get to in a minute.

The two questions I was asked to address were, does the industry need government help to finance biotechnology research, development, and commercializations, and how can government help? Obviously, I only have about seven or eight more minutes, so I'll only address these from my field, which is field crop genetics and biotechnology.

I want to give a two-minute spiel about the history of research and development in this area. Industrial research organizations really only have a very large effort focused on only one crop, which is corn, for various historical and commercial reasons. Even here, they can only do a fraction of the possible research, which does open up the possibility of public sector researchers helping do some of this.

The Canadian public sector research has had very significant contributions in all areas of crop breeding and genetics. Over the last period of time it is getting more difficult to do product development. The technologies for crop genetic improvement have grown more complex and costly. At the same time, I would argue that in the public sector there's been a slow diminution of the public efforts as well as a dilution of R and D into a variety of different areas not related to food production. I can get into that if you have more questions later.

What I do want to spend a bit of time on is looking forward. I do think there are enormous opportunities to be internationally competitive in this area. I just want to highlight some of the strengths and some of the weaknesses we need to solve if we're going to do this.

What are the strengths? Generally we have good infrastructure, for the most part. A lot of that was funded by CFI and other programs that were funded by the federal government. We have good intellectual capabilities. I'd like to say that.

One of the really important things for me has been good funding of matching grants stimulating company-university interactions. This is reasonably unique to Canada when you look at the international scene. What I mean by that is if you get money from a company, then you can get matching funds either from NSERC, our national granting agency, or there are Ontario programs for us here as well.

Why is that important? Obviously it's twofold. One, the company gets a bigger bang for the buck, so it's more interested in doing that. For the individual researcher, it allows you to want to do this, because when you get company money.... I get a lot of money from Syngenta, but I use that to fund technicians to do certain things that have to do with the contract we have. What you can use the matching funds for is to hire post-docs and graduate students and do all the intellectually interesting things that go with that. So that's a really positive strength.

What are the weaknesses? I don't want to harp on this too much, but it's very clear that there's very poor funding of basic research in this area, and when you do international comparisons, that's utterly clear. That does have consequences, but I don't want to spend a lot of time on that.

What I do want to spend a bit more time on is the fact that there is no systematic, sustained, large-scale funding for required capabilities in this area. I think this is really, really important. I'm going to give you a couple of examples in other countries to just describe what I mean by this.

The first example is in Australia. Over the last three years they have funded three different facilities--each costing between $20 million and $30 million--to do something very close to my heart, which is to look at the effect of different crop genetics on different important traits, whether they be drought tolerance, yield, etc. One of the people I trained just left to run one of these facilities, so I know quite a bit about this.

We don't have anything in comparison in this country. I should also say that they not only fund the facility, but they fund the running of the facility in a sustained fashion, which we sometimes fail to do.

The second country...I know China was mentioned a couple of times. We started to develop substantial collaborations with people in China. They have put an enormous amount of money into looking at the genetics of their four most important crops: corn, wheat, rice, and soybeans. Now some of their research capabilities, I would say, are not up to our par, per person, but they're getting better and better all the time, and they'll be a very significant competitor--although my last point is that we can also use them as a collaborator.

And that's my final point. This sort of work is not done in one place, and we tend to have very poor funding for international collaboration. An example I'll give here is again with China. My colleague who works with me, Dr. Yong-Mei Bi, and I went to China a few times and we developed potentially a very large collaboration between the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the University of Guelph. The odd thing is, they're the developing country and they have lots of money to send people over. They're going to send a bunch of graduate students to work here. We have a very difficult time finding the funds to send students the other way, as well as staff and faculty. In a certain sense, it's a bit embarrassing.

The final point I want to make is, in my interactions with both Syngenta and people from other companies, it's very clear that the industry is looking for others for help doing much of the early stage research and development work. I'm absolutely convinced that those companies that develop this role will reap a disproportionate percentage of the benefits, both for their farm sectors as well as in the development of commercial opportunities.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you very much, Mr. Rothstein.

We'll now move to Mr. Allan Paulson from the Advanced Foods and Materials Network.