In our production industry we need to have an R and D strategy to create new products. But one thing this committee might want to consider is looking at the level of public research investment in agriculture and benchmarking Canada versus some of our competitors like the U.S. The numbers are quite startling when you see that the level of public investment in agricultural research in Canada has fallen quite substantially.
Growing Forward is more of a policy framework. That's an important thing to have in place, but some sound arguments can be made that all Canadians would benefit by substantially increasing public research investment to go along with the investment that farmers are now making, where growers in the pulse industry are contributing up to 1% of farm gate receipts to research.
We probably need a good policy framework, but I would encourage you to look at some arguments as to why agricultural research is a good public investment.