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.