Agriculture Committee on Dec. 3rd, 2009

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

I call our meeting to order. Members are trickling in, but because of time we'll get started.

Mr. Surgeoner, we'll start with you.

[Dr. Gord Surgeoner, President, Ontario Agri-Food Technologies]

We'll begin, and I understand I have between five and seven minutes. Because of that, I will just hit the highlights of my presentation. You have all been provided with a copy.

I am president of Ontario Agri-Food Technologies. I answer to a board of directors, five of whom come from the farm associations, two from universities, and three from industry. I should also say, though, that I am chairman of the board of Performance Plants, which is a biotechnology company that is taking technology out of Queen's University and has been in business since 1997.

You asked a number of questions. First of all, I'll go right to the key answer.

Where does our organization believe we are relative to the regulatory process on genetically engineered crops? I would concur with the grains innovation roundtable, held in western Canada: “The current [assessment] structure is delivering science-based”—and I think science-based is the key word—“decisions on a timely basis, enabled by an ever-increasing level of coordination among the participating regulatory agencies.”

At the end of the day, we have had regulations since about 1995. I want to emphasize that in Canada we do not regulate genetic engineering per se; we regulate novelty. In my opinion, that's the way we should operate. It's recognized around the world as the best science-based process. You have to regulate the product, not how you got there. We have what we call plants with novel traits, foods with novel traits, and they go through a regulatory process. In my presentation I outline the entire regulatory process, but I think it's important for you to understand what I mean: that we regulate product and not process.

For example, omega-3 milk had to go through a regulatory process because it had a novel trait: we as humans had not had milk with omega-3 in it. I would just give you an example, too, from traditional plant breeding. Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada developed a new durum wheat that had three times the gluten level in it and proudly announced that we have three times the gluten level. The Italians love it for nice thin pasta. My point here is that it doesn't matter how you get there. Gluten is the celiac trigger for most celiacs in Canada, of which we have 165. That same headline could have said, “Ag Canada scientists increase gluten trigger by 300%”, and that would have been accurate as well. We have to regulate the product, not how we got there. That's what we do in Canada, and I think it's the right approach. We have multiple agencies—Health Canada, Environment Canada, and a whole procedural basis on which we go through regulation. To get any product on the market today is probably about a $10 million process from discovery right through to regulatory approval.

I would indicate that there is an understanding among the major companies that they will not release product for commercial use unless it has been okayed in the United States, Japan, and Canada. It doesn't necessarily have to be okayed in Europe; those are the three areas.

The poll data requirements are based on environment or food and feed, and it's flexible. For example, if you're talking about omega-3 milk, you wouldn't have to look at environmental issues, in my opinion or in regulatory opinion, but you'd have to see whether it had any untoward impact on health.

The point I make here is that we have a system in place; it has been there since 1995. In our jurisdiction, Ontario, about 80% of our soybeans are now genetically engineered; over 50% of our corn is genetically engineered; and indeed, about 90% of canola is genetically engineered. Canola did not exist as a crop per se until 1982; it was rapeseed. I hope you on the ag committee know what canola stands for: canola stands for “Canadian oil, low acid”. We bred out through traditional ways the erucic acid.

Another way to show this is that we can create herbicide tolerance in crops three different ways: one is by genetic engineering; one is by a process called mutagenesis, in which you mutate plants until you find a mutation that provides that particular herbicide resistance, as an example; or we can outcross from other species.

The impact of that herbicide tolerance is by the product, not whether we use mutagenesis or not, because it's the product that is put out into the environment and that's the way the system works. I do want to emphasize it's multi-agency, but over the ten years that we have all worked together--and I want to emphasize in full transparency that all the studies are put forward--you can go to a room to see them, those kinds of things.

The last thing you asked me to address is what types of products are coming down the line. The first wave has been about what I will call biocontrols or controlling pests, so herbicide tolerance, insect resistance, those kinds of things. The next wave of products, and you can go to Ontario's outdoor farm show to see them from a number of companies, is environmental resistance, drought resistance, salt resistance, frost resistance, heat resistance--tolerance is what we call it. The next wave after that are the consumer traits. There are now in test plots omega-3 soybeans, as an example. We are changing the oil profiles of product to reduce the transfatty acids so that, through technology, we are now getting soybeans with the same oil profile as olive oil.

If you look at the waves, then it's been what I'll call controlling pests, reducing the negative impact of the environment and now more enhanced consumer traits, usually for health, but also possibly for industrial purposes as well.

In conclusion, and I just received this last night, so it's not in your package.... It's an AgCanada survey of farmers asking what kind of new technology would they be willing to take up. There are seven technologies. The number one choice of 90% of farmers would be growing genetically modified crops across Canada, and this is the AgCanada survey that was just done.

I think that's very important. I do agree with consumers that we have to talk and there needs to be more education, but I really caution when people say 80% of consumers want it on the label. If you go and blindly ask consumers and you don't give them a question such as “are you concerned about this”, only about 1% to 6%, so top-of-mind, will say food safety, diseases, pathogens, for obvious reasons that you've obviously gone through--things like hormones, pesticide residues, those kinds of things--but genetic engineering per se is down less than 10% and getting smaller all the time.

I think we all agree we need strong regulatory process. It is working. To our knowledge, there has not been a single case of human problems associated with this, and I do document a number of cases where we've reduced fossil fuels, for example. We've allowed for no till on two million acres in Ontario, which has greatly reduced soil erosion. Those kinds of things have happened as well.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you very much, Mr. Surgeoner.

We now have Mr. Devlin Kuyek, from the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network.

[Devlin Kuyek, Special Advisor, Canadian Biotechnology Action Network]

My name is Devlin Kuyek. I'm a special advisor and a member of the steering committee of the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network. We're a coalition of 17 groups from across Canada and we represent farmers' organizations, environmental and international development groups and various grassroots coalitions. A three-year-old network, it brings together at least 15 years of civil society experience working on this issue of GMOs. We have submitted a brief that gives you a sense of the expertise we have on the issue of regulations.

I am an author and researcher who has written extensively on the seed system and seed policies in Canada and on the issue of GMOs. I also work with an organization called Grain, an international non-governmental organization with head offices in Barcelona.

We just have a short amount of time, so I'm going to broaden things out to look a bit more at the general context here.

To understand where we are with GMOs in Canada, you have to look at it as a deliberate policy shift that has taken what we call a public seed system with broad-based support from farmers, scientists, and the general public to what we have today, which is essentially a corporate seed system where the research agenda is in the hands of a very small number of corporations, most of them pesticide corporations outside of Canada.

The strategy to make this transformation happen goes back about 30 years. To understand what it has meant, you have to look at the whole packet of stuff that has been put in place to support this industry. Billions of dollars have been spent over the last 30 years to support biotech start-up firms and to give direct subsidies to the companies. Public plant breeding programs have been slashed and public breeding programs have been privatized. Seed regulations have been changed in order to facilitate this industry and do away with protections for farmers. We've implemented a whole range of new laws, including plant breeders' rights legislation. We've also allowed for patents on life, which is something very new and which has meant that farmers can no longer save seeds. Less seed saving is happening, which needs to be seen as a subsidy to this industry.

Overall, through this amount of subsidization, this amount of privatization, and with all these changes to the regulations, what we have in effect done is made it impossible for other alternatives to exist. The contamination that we've now seen with flax, which is happening with canola, is also another case where we're doing away with alternative space where other forms of plant breeding and other seed systems can exist. It's all been in the name of supporting this biotech industry.

Even when we talk about regulations and the regulations Canada has developed since the 1980s--really, starting more in the 1990s--these regulations also have been primarily driven by a desire to protect this biotech industry. Nothing is done that might impinge on the success of the GMO industry, so we don't bring in labelling, which would be a minimum requirement you would imagine for a government wanting to bring in such a risky technology as GMOs. And there's no liability that exists, so when a situation like contamination happens with flax, producers are just left on the hook for millions of dollars in damages.

What about this industry would justify such enormous privilege coming from our federal government? What is this industry, to begin with? What industry do we have if we look at the biotech industry today? Eighty-seven percent of the GM seed grown in the world today is sold by one company, Monsanto. They control 87% of the GM seed supply in the world. And just three pesticide companies--it's important to note that all are agro-chemical companies--control nearly half of the global proprietary seed supply. Twenty years ago, these companies were not even involved in seeds. Actually, there was very little participation in the private sector, at least from the corporate side.

These companies, it has to be pointed out, have specific interests when it comes to seeds. Monsanto has said on other occasions that seeds are for them a means to control the food supply. What it is that they want to do with seeds is tie farmers to the use of their proprietary herbicides, which is why we've seen an escalation in the amount of glyphosate use, which is of course produced by Monsanto. They want to be able to exercise patents and control, which is why we're seeing insecticides now being produced through the plants. These are the Bt crops, which produce the insecticide in the plant itself, which of course are patent-protected by these companies.

This is the overwhelming focus. We can talk about waves and coming waves of technology. We have of course yet to see that, but this is the overwhelming focus of these companies. It's important to bear in mind, too, when we talk about things like salt tolerance or drought or we talk about these changes to the oil content of crops, that all these things were possible and are possible and are being done with conventional plant breeding.

That's where we have been negligent to invest and that's where the focus on GM has really hurt. It has hurt farmers because these companies can charge increasingly because of the control they have. They can charge exorbitant rates for their seeds, so it's no surprise when you see farmers now trying to get out of hybrid canola by doing their own research on seeds that they have saved, even though it's hybrids. There were questions of why are farmers doing this. Well, it's because the seed prices keep going up.

Last year, at the height of the food crisis, when commodity prices were at an all-time high, Monsanto used that as an opportunity to boost up its profits. It doubled its profits last year. What happened for farmers? Farmers' net farm income in Canada and the U.S., where this company has the most control, declined at a time when farm-gate prices were at all-time highs. I think it's time, since we've had our national biotechnology strategy in place for nearly 30 years, that we start to take a look at defining seed policies that meet the needs of the Canadian public, that we start to legislate on behalf of the Canadian public and not on behalf of the shareholders of a small number of corporations based in foreign countries.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you.

Mr. Boehm, from the National Farmers Union.

[Terry Boehm, President, National Farmers Union]

Yes, thank you.

My name is Terry Boehm, and I'm currently serving as the president of the NFU. The NFU is the largest voluntary, direct-membership farm organization in Canada, incorporated by an act of Parliament in 1969, so this makes this our fortieth anniversary.

What I'd like to talk about, of course, is to reinforce some of the things that Mr. Kuyek has spoken about. There is this model of control that's being exerted, this model that farmers are experiencing with increased seed prices and increasingly fewer options, particularly in canola, other than GM varieties, and there are mechanisms that are being exercised on them to make sure they comply totally, either through contractual arrangements, threats of legal action, or other mechanisms that keep them in line as far as buying seeds on an annual basis is concerned.

There's an assumption made about GM crops that GM is synonymous with yield increases. I'm a canola producer. I'm a conventional farmer, and I have chosen to stay outside of the GM program, particularly because of the issues that I recognized around escalating seed prices and control, etc. For example, there are very few conventional GM open-pollinated varieties left available. Most of them have unfortunately been cancelled or deregistered, and I want to address that a little bit later in what I have to say. On the varieties of non-GM canola that I'm growing, this past year I had 45 bushels per acre in Saskatchewan, which is a very good yield, and generally speaking, the varieties that I have been growing have been equivalent or even slightly better than the best hybrids out there.

It's more a function of weather conditions and conventional breeding that has brought those traits along for those varieties. In canola, for example, the GM technology has very little to do with yield and everything to do with herbicide tolerance, and that's the trait that has been emphasized in regard to that. The advances in yield and other agronomic characteristics have generally been advanced by conventional breeding programs.

Now, several problems are cropping up with GMOs--pardon the pun--in Canada, and of course GE flax is front and foremost for those of us producing flax. I had a part to play in the cancellation or deregistration of Triffid flax some eight years ago, so I'm intimately familiar with that issue. But what are we experiencing right now? We've seen one of the rare instances when farmers and industry, in all aspects, cooperated to have this variety deregistered, in spite of the fact that we had a regulatory system that allowed that variety to move through completely unimpinged by any factor, to have it removed in recognition of the market harm that would result from that coming forward. We initiated a plan to have some 180,000 bushels of certified flax seed destroyed. Unfortunately, I guess the program wasn't totally successful.

We've seen the European market close to flax, which is a premium market, which is a market that has no tolerance for this unapproved GM flax, which I might add was a completely useless product. Even prairie farmers didn't see it having any value when it was introduced. Nevertheless, our regulatory system both then and today would allow that particular variety to move through with no barriers.

How many markets can we afford to lose in this manner without recognition that there are markets in the world and that the economic well-being, both for Canadians and farmers, is hinged around a successful access to some of these markets?

One of the more interesting things is this. We've had a great deal of discussion over the years with CFIA and others about adventitious presence and the need to establish percentages in crop kinds to allow for the contamination that occurs with GM crops in the general environment.

Now we're in a situation where we have Triffid flax, the GM flax, an unapproved event in Japan. The flax industry and the canola industry, which is largely GE canola, are now worried about having GE canola markets closed in Japan because of adventitious presence contamination with unapproved GE flax and dockage.

I would say that if you accept the regulatory system as it exists, you will continue to run into these problems, because GM wheat would have proceeded through the regulatory process had not Monsanto voluntarily withdrawn it some five years ago, and we would be confronted with the same situation. Eighty-two percent of our premium market customers said they would look elsewhere for wheat supplies if Canada went down that path. GM wheat is in the offing. Some groups are lobbying for it, and indeed the industry is speaking about reviving that in a different form.

SmartStax corn is another example with which we have issues with both Health Canada and the environmental release of these products. It has six Bt traits that give it insect resistance, and two herbicide traits that allow it to be resistant to two different herbicides. Unfortunately, it hasn't really been looked at in any way that is significantly different from looking at the individual traits. The approval of individual traits normalizes it in any combination in the plants. This is actually in conflict with some of the dialogue that's in the regulations around regulating plants with normal traits, which is particularly problematic with regard to recognition elsewhere in the world. Products of GE and rDNA technology have created significant harm for many sectors, including the organic sector, which has lost many options.

Now we have a variety registration system that was modernized in June and July of this year, which has allowed the potential movement of crop kinds into less onerous merit testing requirements, agronomic testing, etc., which would allow even a quicker acceleration once those crop kinds are moved into a less onerous tier. I can assure you that industry will argue that they need the less onerous tiers in order to advance the magic bullets they have in their back pocket, and it's just too expensive to go through this testing and the recommending committees.

The CFIA actually, in their arguments for the variety registration changes, even suggested that this would allow the decision to commercialize new varieties to be made solely by the developers and not to be dependent upon a recommendation made from a recommending committee. Again environmental and market concerns go by the wayside and we run into a situation where farmers are left holding the bag.

There is a myriad of things on there. All I can say is we've ended up needing more comprehensive hearings among health, environment, and agriculture. We've ended up with expensive seeds and lost markets for farmers. How much can the Canadian economy afford going down this path?

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you.

Dr. Andrée, from Ottawa University--no, from Carleton University in Ottawa.

[Dr. Peter Andrée, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Carleton University]

It is Carleton, yes. We're not meant to be mistaken, are we?

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

I had the Ottawa part right anyway.

Go ahead, sir.

[Dr. Peter Andrée]

Thank you very much for having me here today.

My name is Peter Andrée and I'm a professor in political science at Carleton University. I come at this from having studied the regulatory system in Canada for a number of years and having done research interviewing our regulators, and also looking at the international politics of GE regulation, regulation of genetically modified foods and crops.

First, I want to thank you for inviting me here today--that's the first thing I wanted to say. I think this is an important time for this debate, particularly because of the two issues that Terry just raised, the seeming approval of SmartStax corn in Canada without Health Canada's actually giving it regulatory oversight--and I'll come back to that in a second--and this case of the GE flax, which is not meant to be grown in Canada but has still managed to destroy overseas markets for Canadian farmers. Both of those issues point to weaknesses within our regulatory system, and if we don't figure out how to fill them soon, we're going to have more of these problems and we'll be putting Canadian farmers at risk again.

I should also clarify that while I am critical of the regulatory system for GMOs in Canada, I'm not against the technology per se. That's where I stand on these issues.

In September I was invited to speak at a symposium that the Royal Society of Canada organized together with l'Académie des sciences in France on the issue of GMOs. The symposium brought together scientists and people who study regulation and social issues from those two countries. I've passed out a presentation I did there, called “An Analysis of GMO Regulation in Canada: Eight Critical Issues”, in which I look at issues of the use of substantial equivalence in Canada, allergenicity testing, transparency, peer review--a number of areas that the Royal Society of Canada was invited by the Canadian government back almost ten years ago to do a thorough analysis of in terms of how effective the regulatory system is; whether there are any holes in that system, given the products that are going to be coming down the pipe; and what we need to improve that system.

In 2001 the Royal Society of Canada expert panel produced a substantial report, several hundred pages, in which they outlined 63 recommendations. One of the pieces of research I've done, I think it was five or six years ago now, was to look in detail at how the Canadian regulators responded to those 63 recommendations. My analysis would suggest there are still some critical holes that were identified in 2001 that remain to be filled. As I said, Canada really has to move on these if we're going to not put our farmers at economic risk in the way Terry was talking about.

I'm just going to touch on three of these eight issues, for the sake of moving us along. The first is this whole question of substantial equivalence. I won't get into all the technical details, but it essentially means that the regulators at Health Canada--and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency also uses this concept--compare the genetically modified food or plants to a non-modified counterpart and look for any areas where there are significant differences. If there are areas of significant difference, then it gets evaluated in more thorough testing.

This concept has been controversial, and in 2001 the Royal Society of Canada quite explicitly laid out to the regulators how the concept should be used. They said that if you're going to make a determination of substantial equivalence, you should look at the DNA structure, gene expression, proteomic analysis, which are the proteins that are created by those genes in the plant or food, and secondary metabolite profiling. They really spelled out that if you're going to understand these new crops in relation to the ones we've been using for a long time, these are the levels at which you have to understand the differences.

In the case of SmartStax corn, which Terry just pointed out, this is a corn variety that CFIA approved this summer. It has six traits that allow the plant to create Bttoxins, and then there are two herbicide resistance traits. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency, which looks at feed safety and environmental safety, did an analysis of this crop and approved it. Health Canada didn't look at it at all. The reason for that is because each of the eight traits, either singly or in pair, had been previously assessed. The assumption that they're going on is that the combination, the whole, is no different from the sum of the parts.

That's not the assumption the Europeans would make when they look at this, or most other regulatory systems in the world. In fact, even the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency just this past year had a whole scientific meeting where they looked at this question of stacked traits in crops. They said that there is the possibility of synergistic effects of these genes interacting. So we really need to look carefully at that before just assuming that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

In Canada, the way the system is right now, Health Canada did not look at this product. I know there are people within Health Canada who would have liked to, but it's a hole in our regulatory system.

Related to that issue is the question of who is responsible for identifying potential problems. Our regulatory system actually requires that the applicant, the company bringing a product like SmartStax forward, identify if there are any changes that require further scrutiny.

There's a disconnect here as well because when The Globe and Mail wrote an article about this whole SmartStax getting through the Canadian regulatory system, the reporter approached Monsanto and asked, “Did you look carefully? Did you do the science to see if there are any differences between this eight-trait stacked product and the non-genetically-modified competitors?” Monsanto said that they didn't have to do that science because there's no need for additional safety assessments from Health Canada and the CFIA. So neither group is taking the time to do the science to figure out if there are any unexpected effects from the stacked product.

The second issue that I want to raise is the question of transparency in the regulatory system. I think it will interest some members of this committee that the Quebec government is the only provincial government that has an inter-ministerial committee that's kind of tracking the GMO regulatory approvals process at the federal level. I've been communicating with some members of that committee, and they are very frustrated. There have been inter-ministerial meetings between the Quebec government and the federal government to increase the transparency on two levels--both public access to some detail about how regulatory decisions are made, and allowing outside and independent scientists to verify the kinds of data upon which these decisions are made. That's a real concern for the Quebec government.

The last issue that I want to quickly touch on is this whole question of socio-economic considerations. It relates to the flax issue that Terry pointed out.

One of my pieces of research was on how the Canadian government dealt with the case of Roundup-ready wheat, or genetically engineered wheat, that was moving through the regulatory system in 2003-2004. It had been approved by Health Canada. It's not clear what the final response will be from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.

I have to say that I felt they were doing a very good job and applying very tight scrutiny to this product. I think that's partly because they were getting some pressure from above. That's because if it had gone through, there would be no other mechanism to prevent this product from getting used by even just a few Canadian farmers. And if a small amount of that Roundup-ready wheat was in shipments going over to Europe, then all of the shipments would be turned back. That's a multi-billion-dollar industry. The federal government just didn't have a mechanism for saying that because in this case there's large economic harm that can happen with this product, we need a mechanism in place to prevent it from being used in Canada.

I interviewed a number of civil servants who, just like the minister at the time, were completely unprepared to deal with this because they didn't have the mechanism in place. I understand that you're all now looking at whether there's a mechanism for examining the economic harm, and I think that's really important.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you.

Mr. Valeriote.

[Frank Valeriote, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

First of all, thank you, gentlemen, for taking time out of your busy schedules to come to Ottawa. We really appreciate it. To be honest, we're not going to be able to give this issue what it deserves in the time we've allotted you or those people we heard from on Tuesday. Nevertheless, we have to take a shot at it.

I went to Rome about two weeks ago, to the FAO conference on poverty and malnutrition in developing countries. We all know that by 2050 we're going to have over three billion more people on this planet and we're going to have to increase our food production by over 70%. We already have over a billion people who are starving.

With what I read and what I could consume at the time, I came to the conclusion that if we're going to solve the problem of world hunger, GMOs are going to have to be part of that solution. That's what I concluded. And it has to be in a very balanced way, not the extreme, on either side.

But one thing that concerned me, apart from the issue of safety—which I hope I can get to in a second question—was based on this article I read:

According to Monsanto, it takes at least 10 years and between $100-$150 million to introduce new genetically modified trait into plant varieties.

This is in contrast to conventional, commercial breeders who rarely spend more than $1 million to breed a plant variety. (DNA marker assisted breeding technologies can speed the pace of conventional breeding.) In short, for every new biotech variety, conventional breeders can introduce between 100 and 150 standard varieties—in less time.

I don't know if this is true or not.

Despite this, the world's largest seed companies are working almost exclusively on GM seeds.

I'll ask this question to Dr. Surgeoner. One of the concerns I have is the exploitation of third world countries by these large companies. I think you have to admit that a lot of people are afraid of the big companies taking over, which Devlin Kuyek mentioned. Can you address that? Can you ease the concerns of people in any way? If you can't, are there things that government should do to prevent that from happening?

[Dr. Gord Surgeoner]

The first thing I'd like to address is hunger. Hunger is multi-faceted, and part of it is that we will need to essentially double production in the next 50 years. I agree with that, and there are many tools.... But most hunger is an infrastructure issue, man's inhumanity to man. There are distribution of wealth issues in many cases. It's not productivity issues, per se.

To my knowledge, most of the multinationals.... I'll speak specifically for our company: we provided free of charge to Africa Harvest, one of the major FAO NGOs in Africa, all the information and the genetics for drug tolerance, for example, that subsistence farmers could use in sorghum and many other crops. I would emphasize that this is a Canadian company—$50 million of Canadian investors; essentially 95% of the investors have been Canadian. That was all given free of charge to Africa Harvest and to what we call the CIMIT labs across the world. The FAO has research labs for cassava, potatoes, etc., around the world, and the companies have provided these technologies free of charge to FAO agencies to use in production of seed for subsistence farmers.

[Frank Valeriote, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

So you're saying subsistence farmers, the small-holder farmers in developing countries, needn't worry about the availability of seed in order to maintain and grow their crops.

[Dr. Gord Surgeoner]

Government always needs to maintain a public sector breeding program, and that includes the United Nations, which has done that. Suddenly we are starting to put a lot more resources into what I will call the science of agriculture and traditional breedings. But we have to have FAO and the United Nations with those centres. There's a rice centre, for example, in the Philippines. But yes, those technologies have been turned over for subsistence farmers.

[Frank Valeriote, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Devlin, I'd like to ask you a question about food safety. You mentioned that safety is an issue, and it is an issue for me. On Tuesday one of the witnesses said that even though ten years have gone by and there hasn't been a single incident of injury or bad health, you can't guarantee anything 100%. What they did say, and I thought it was interesting, is that we need transparency of public institutions and corporations, traceability, more research, and proper government approvals working together to gain the trust of the public on the issue of safety with respect to GMOs.

Do you agree with that proposal, and do you think we could work toward the use of GMOs, provided there is this transparency and traceability, etc?

[Devlin Kuyek]

At present there's very little transparency or access. Recently, the 26 top corn scientists in the U.S. sent out a letter saying that they can't get access to the data they need from GM crops because it's all locked up under contract and under patent. So they can't get any access to it.

It raises a lot of issues with this question of public breeding programs. One of the big problems right now is that the biodiversity that exists, the genetic resources that are out there, so much of it now is being locked up by these companies. As a public breeder you can't get access to it, so it's creating sort of segregated streams of research. And there's very little happening—unless it's locked in with licensing agreements and you name it—in a public way any more because so much of it is locked up by the—

[Frank Valeriote, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

But do you agree that—

[The Acting Chair, Conservative, Brian Storseth]

Thank you, Mr. Valeriote. You're well over your time. Thank you.

[Devlin Kuyek]

Can I finish what I was saying?

[The Acting Chair, Conservative, Brian Storseth]

Yes, quickly.

[Devlin Kuyek]

Also on this point of access, right now hunger is a question of access. We have 20% of humanity that doesn't have access to food, and 80% of those people are farmers. They don't have access to food-producing resources. If we put more of those food-producing resources in the hands of companies who want to extract profit, that means as the situation becomes more and more difficult these companies are going to be able to charge more and more.

Monsanto is very clear that they want to see Africa as an eventual market. That's part of their strategy for making things available right now.

[The Acting Chair, Conservative, Brian Storseth]

Thank you.

Madame Bonsant.

[France Bonsant, Bloc, Compton—Stanstead, QC]

Sorry for being late. We were at the House commemorating the death of 14 young women 20 years ago at the Polytechnique de Montréal. I just had to be there.

Mr. Kuyek, I listened to what you said regarding GMOs and it scared me somewhat. In Quebec, we have an increasing number of organic farms. How will they be able to continue growing organic crops on these farms given Monsanto's monopoly?

[Devlin Kuyek]

May I answer in French?