I worked with Dr. Rene Van Acker on my Ph.D. He was an adviser on my project, so I am very familiar with his work.
Rene's work and the work of other research scientists show unequivocally that genetically engineered crops move across the landscape. Even if they don't outcross at large distances, through the different handling methods, the segregation system, and the nature of biology itself, they reproduce, and we have these crops reproducing in fields on their own and moving around over time, and that causes the widespread adventitious presence that we are talking about, the contamination.
These impacts are very widespread. When you talk about introducing a market clause in regulation and that perhaps adversely affecting the industry, well, the impact of not looking at the potential market impact.... Take LibertyLink rice, and the billions of dollars spent in lost farm profits and the regulatory system, and trying to figure out how to deal with that; there are very substantial economic impacts from not trying to assess this up front. The wheat example is a perfect one.
Furthermore, there was a comment that there is no demonstrated environmental harm caused by this technology. I have to disagree with that. If you look at some of the landraces in Mexico that have been outcrossed by genetically modified corn, the actual landraces, the original maize varieties that created the modern corn that we have today, are increasingly contaminated by GMO crops, and those traits have unintended consequences in the genome that we might not know. Essentially, on those landraces, research communities around the world are trying to save them because those have germplasm and biological diversity in them that might be very important to future generations and our ability to create a sustainable food system. As we lose those landraces due to conventional breeding and loss of traditional varieties and outcrossing of these genetically engineered types, we are actually losing our genetic heritage.
This is a very serious issue. It is one that really needs to be addressed. You talk about this technology being here to stay. I think we can learn from our past. History repeats itself, and this committee needs to try to ensure that doesn't happen with respect to new types of biotechnology. If we're talking about pharmaceutical-trait crops, all it takes is for pharmaceuticals to get into the food supply for the entire Canadian food system to collapse.
Think about how much that would cost when all of a sudden there are pharmaceutical drugs in the food and all countries of the world aren't taking Canadian exports. These are the types of issues we're talking about when we talk about increasing our regulatory system to protect Canadians, and also to protect the very industry that is developing these crops, because as soon as that happens, Canadian biotech is over.