Thank you, Chair.
It's such a privilege to be able to speak to this bill before the committee. I will restrict my intervention to issues bordering on farmers' rights.
As you have noticed throughout the process, there have been a lot of organizations that claim to represent farmers and farmers' interests. They make overlapping claims in relation to breeders, producers, and every other stakeholder in the agricultural industry. This has been reflected in the way they have spoken in relation to the issue of farmers' rights and farmers' privileges, but it also speaks to the very nature of the complicated framework in which we conduct agricultural production in the 21st century.
I want us to pay close attention to what could be the distinction between farming and breeding. They overlap and that is very important as to how we will capture the interests of farmers.
The private sector and technology-driven industrial stakes and investments in agriculture have constituted some degree of pressure to constrain the farmers' ability to use and save seeds and exchange farm-saved seeds. This is understandable because Canada is an industrial agricultural country. Trying to upgrade our law to UPOV 91 has the potential to advance our global competitiveness and also reflects the highly industrialized nature of agricultural production.
There are other benefits regarding enhanced plant breeders' rights. Those benefits are essentially inconclusive and highly contested, but just by the industrialized nature of agricultural production we still have smallholder farmers. Those are the incarnates of historic family farmers. They use, they exchange, and they share farm-saved seeds, including traditional land uses and even those of propagating varieties.
This group of small farmers conducts informal research and development and they are practising conservation. We need them for sustainable agriculture because history shows us that industrial agriculture, genetic modification of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture could sometimes run into crisis.
I invite the committee to consider section 5(3)(2) of the bill. It speaks in relation to farmers' rights or privileges as described in the bill. The rights referred to are in paragraphs 1(a) and (b), which are the breeders' rights:
—do not apply to harvested material of the plant variety that is grown by a farmer on the farmer’s holdings and used by the farmer on those holdings for the sole purpose of propagation of the plant variety.
What this means is that it speaks to only a category of farmers and these are farmers we could call hobby farmers. These are farmers who do not want to do anything commercial with their harvest. They are balcony farmers, actually downtown farmers. These are not the smallholder farmers we should be speaking to.
These smallholder farmers are very critical. They may not afford royalty fees, but in my view they do not constitute a threat to breeders and breeders' rights. So instead of outright banning commercial activity which some UPOV nations have done, some have also followed the path of looking at the size of holding, the size of harvest, and percentage of annual income in relation to smallholder farmers who use propagating varieties in order to determine whether they fall under that exception for farmers' privilege.
I want to draw the committee's attention to article 9 of the FAO 2001 International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. Canada is a party to that treaty and that treaty speaks of famine and agriculture from a conservation perspective. It also recognizes the role of traditional knowledge in farming practices. As much as Canada has decided to go through the UPOV 91 model, there is still a lot in the international treaty on plant genetic resources that speaks to farmers' rights, which we can actually help incorporate into this bill in order to ensure that we protect those farmers who are hardly spoken for, who are very critical to the conservation of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture.
I'm happy to welcome questions. Thank you.