Agriculture Committee on Dec. 14th, 2010

[André Bellavance, Bloc, Richmond—Arthabaska, QC]

That brings me to the issue of research funding. University researchers were already looking into nanotechnology, this nanocrystalline cellulose. Unfortunately, due to lack of public funding, they had to stop their research. Fortunately, it was restored. But I can't help thinking about the fact that we had that lack of funding for a certain amount of time. We may not have been here today with a pilot plant. Eventually, more and more possibilities will open up to us. There was still that lack of funding. But this was a technology for the future.

I give you the floor. The importance of public funding in terms of research and new technology, without question...

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Mark Eyking]

Your time is almost up, so the answers will have to be very quick.

[Dr. Gord Surgeoner]

In my opinion, public funding of research is absolutely critical to what we call Canada, both in the development of products but also in assessment of safety, etc.

There are two key things on that. I believe you go from the discovery research to capturing it. And when you capture that research, you'd better have your customers at the table, and you'd better have been working with industry right from the start.

I think historically in our public sector and universities, we did research and made it into perfection, but we were never talking to our customers or people who were going to use it. We have to understand that not only does it work and we can do it, but the competition, the price, and how we put in supply chains.

There's a lot more than just the discovery to ensure that we as Canadians build it here, make it here, and sell it to world. I think that's very important.

So public sector research is critical.

[Dr. Ian J. Mauro]

I want to make a quick comment. I think that with biotechnology we've seen a huge amount of industry dollars driving the research; we haven't seen the same amount of public money going to public projects to develop regulations or systems of accountability.

I think the same thing applies with nanotechnology. We need to have public money that allows for publicly funded research that is independent from industry, that allows us to have our own set of eyes and ears on the issue, and that we're not being spoon-fed information that doesn't have an analysis, that has public dollars and no attachment.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Mark Eyking]

Okay, we're going to go to the next round of questions.

We'll go to the NDP, to Mr. Atamanenko.

Mr. Atamanenko was very instrumental in bringing this discussion forward this year.

Alex, you have the floor.

[Alex Atamanenko, NDP, British Columbia Southern Interior, BC]

Thank you, gentlemen, for being here.

I want to summarize the debate here, and what the discussion is about, in my own mind. We have very well-developed innovation and research in biotechnology in Canada. As far as I understand it, most of the traits, the successes, that we've developed in agriculture have been through non-GM. In other words, all of the hybrid varieties that we've developed have been the result of companies and government working on research.

The two GM traits, where we take a gene from one species and transplant it into another, is what this is about. My bill tackles the HT, the Roundup herbicide tolerant, and also the Bt, where we have resistance to pests. These are the two traits that are being used in Canada. Many countries are against this technology. If we wish to deal with them, we have to be very careful.

Mr. Surgeoner, you mentioned that we need to talk to customers. We've seen the example of flax. My concern, and the concern of many, is in regard to wheat and alfalfa specifically, but this does not negate any other research that's happening in the whole biotech industry.

The main concern—and Dr. Mauro, I believe you summarized it, based on your discussions with 2,500 farmers—is that they're worried about markets. They're worried about corporate control and the privatization of seeds. Tied in with this are agronomic contamination with volunteers and the gene flow, because the genes escape and escalate into other risks. I guess that's my main concern when I look at my bill, for example.

I look at the study that your colleague Dr. Van Acker has done in regard to contamination. Traits can move from crop to crop through pollen. They move through the equipment, human handling, farm equipment in the business operation, and people not even involved in this contamination.

Contamination has caused some problems in the United States, for example, where Starlink, a corn engineered to express insecticide protein, was approved. It was found in processed foods, and then we had the whole problem of how to get it out of the food chain. Recently, LibertyLink rice, where regulated rice escaped field trials, was found in many events in the commercial rice supply chain. The economic impact on U.S. rice farmers was $1 billion.

Then we look at the submission by Mr. Toews from the Wheat Board. He talked about how, in bulk handling of wheat, it's very difficult to contain. Organic farmers and others have talked about how alfalfa, if it were released, would be very hard to contain.

How can we move on with this industry without any regulations? Evidently the science base that we have is not quite enough. There has to be some collaboration and some control, so that if crops are developed, people would at least have an opportunity to make some money, whether it would be the company or the farmer.

Maybe I'll just start here and work down.

[Dr. Ian J. Mauro]

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.

[Alex Atamanenko, NDP, British Columbia Southern Interior, BC]

I have just one more comment before I have to move on.

Mr. Surgeoner, you mentioned the new apple in your presentation. Apparently the B.C. Fruit Growers have come out against this because they are afraid of contamination and cross-pollination.

[Dr. Gord Surgeoner]

I'd like to address a couple of issues.

We talk about corporate control in agriculture. The last I saw it, one of the most important things in agriculture is financing. I have about five banks I can go to in Canada, plus FCC.

If I talk about fertilizer--Potash, Agrium, Mosaic--there are about four fertilizer companies. If I talk about tractors, the last I saw it, they were green, red, and blue. If I talk about trucks, it's GM, Ford, the Japanese.

Those are all absolutely critical areas of agriculture, but we're familiar with them. We are down to about four to five choices that we, as producers, can make in all of those things that are absolutely critical to agriculture.

Look at railways. If I want to ship my wheat, I have CP and CN. That's down to two, and those are on the stock market. Every one of those are publicly traded companies.

So when we talk about corporate control in this area, it is, I should emphasize, absolutely no different from my wheat, my movement, my plowing, all of those things where there are four or five companies involved in it on the marketplace.

Second of all, when we talk about markets, one of the things I would emphasize on organics is that organic is about the process. Yes, I realize the organic farmers have set a standard where we will not accept certain amounts of cross-contamination, if we want to call it that. But if this is a process thing where I did not use that as one of my producers, but some came in, that is not.... They are making that standard, because it is a process standard that I did not make. We will accept pesticide residues in organic. So it is a standard that is self-imposed.

You may get Walmart or somebody else saying they insist on this, but at the end of the day, organic is about process, again, not product in that case.

So those are a couple of things, but I really have to emphasize that in almost everything we do in agriculture, we have about five or six suppliers, from money to tractors to trucks to rail, in all of those things. You may not like that, but that is the reality.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Mark Eyking]

Okay, Mr. Atamanenko, your time is up--unless there's something quick to add.

[Alex Atamanenko, NDP, British Columbia Southern Interior, BC]

No, thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Mark Eyking]

We're now going to go over to the government side, the Conservatives, and we're going to start with Mr. Hoback.

Mr. Hoback was also instrumental in getting this study under way.

Randy, you have the floor.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

Thank you, Chair.

Thanks to all of you for being here this morning. It's always interesting to come to Ottawa when it snows and rains, right?

This study, I'm very excited about it, and with that excitement comes caution, just like with anything else. You see all the potential, all the future hurdles, and the problems we're facing now in our environment, in our ability to feed ourselves in the future. Then you look at the potential for farmers to grow not just food but also other things. There is such a variety of things to look at in my plate--yes, “plate” might be a good word--of what my options are with my land, what I can do, how I can do it, what I can grow.

You know, the days of growing corn in Saskatchewan aren't too far away. In fact in some areas they're growing corn now, where 20 years ago they would not grow corn.

So I look at it and I get really excited, but there are some questions we need to answer, and some hurdles. I want to see this industry grow. Regardless of what we think personally, it has to happen. If we want to feed our world, this is where we have to go.

Mr. Surgeoner, you talked about process, and that's a key in this whole equation. Process is often irrelevant, as long as the product is safe. That's the guide we have to use, as government, when we look at the food we're eating. If you want to use an organic process, if you want to use a conventional process, if you want to use a process of no-till farming, that's the freedom to farm. That's up to you, as a producer, to make those decisions. But the end use is up to us, as government, and the consumer is our main concern.

So maybe you've marketed yourself that organic's better, you've used a process, and you've used marketing to develop a market for your product. Now if you decide that you don't want to go through that process, that you want to be growing higher yields and have more options, then you use another process.

Is that a fair statement on how governments should look at this whole sector on the food side of things?

[Dr. Gord Surgeoner]

There are two things on the process side. One is that most people here are talking about biotechnology as genetic engineering, and what I'm emphasizing to you is herbicide tolerance can be by a mutation. Much of our new crops can be by mutational breeding. Are we going to have a science-based process to determine safety, to determine environmental impacts?

The market issues are important to everybody--I'm the first to agree with that--but at the end of the day, what kind of rules are we going to have around that? That's something that is absolutely critical to everybody. Only if you have a set of rules can you know whether to invest or not. If those rules are constantly changing, then, I'm sorry, people will abandon Canada as a place to put their money in this area--if we're constantly changing the rules.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

So one of the first things we'd be talking about here is how to get a consistent set of fair rules that everybody knows and understands—they know the playing field, and they know exactly what they have to do in order to have a product move through the system.

[Dr. Gord Surgeoner]

Right.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

How do you see a product for non-food use? Should that have the same standards as products for food use?

[Dr. Gord Surgeoner]

You have to look at each individual crop. Something like miscanthus right now is an “imported” crop.

I should emphasize for everyone in this room that we really have only four crops that are actually native to Canada. Wheat, corn, soybeans—all those are non-native. Miscanthus is a crop that came out of Japan. In Ontario, we hope to use it to get rid of coal-fired electrical generation. It'll support a lot of producers in firing those electrical plants.

It's a hard, woody stick, much like wood, so I don't see that there's any eating involved in that: do I need to do very intensive studies on the toxicology? We need some basics, yes. But we also learn by history. It's been in Japan for a thousand years, and to my knowledge, no animals, no people.... We can go back and look, but rather than force a massive cost process, learn from history. Learn from real-world experience, and add that to what I call logical regulatory oversight.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

Mr. Mauro, you talked about your study on the Roundup Ready wheat. I remember those debates going on in the prairies when I was farming, and, boy, there was a lot of emotion in those debates. In fact, there was a lot of misinformation and emotion in those debates. It was really hard for an average farmer to actually sit back and sort through what was accurate and what wasn't accurate.

One thing I did know, which seemed to be the concern with Roundup wheat for a lot of guys, was the effect of Roundup in their rotation. By putting a cereal in there and not being able to spray Roundup on, let's say, Roundup canola, to get rid of that cereal that was going to create a problem.

So in your studies, did you sense the issue was GMO wheat or was it the fact that it was Roundup Ready wheat, that Roundup was the product that was going to be used to control...?

[Dr. Ian J. Mauro]

You're a farmer. You obviously know the issues, and that's a very good point.

With Roundup Ready wheat, you had two Roundup Ready crops in rotation in Canadian farms, and so when you're planting Roundup Ready canola--or you're not--those volunteers are everywhere. So even a farmer not growing LibertyLink canola has Roundup Ready volunteers, and all of a sudden they start putting Roundup Ready wheat in their seed drills, and they can't control the Roundup Ready canola volunteers in their Roundup Ready wheat, and the system doesn't work anymore.

For farmers, it was a no-brainer. You say there's misinformation and a lot of emotion. In my research for the published paper there were almost 2,000 farmers in that specific survey. Through the law of averages, you build a big data set and you start to get those salient facts in what people were thinking. Really there were ecological issues, as you're saying, combined with market harm. It just made no sense for Canadian farmers.

With respect to biotechnology, I agree with my friends here on the idea that it's on a case-by-case basis. There are some crops that aren't going to make sense in Canadian farm rotations, and in the marketplace there are other crops that might make sense. I'm not here to present the notion that all biotechnology is bad. I think we need to evaluate these technologies based on their merits as individual crops.

With respect to organic farmers and your question about process, we're on Parliament Hill right now. Democracy doesn't just happen. The product of democracy does not just exist intrinsically. There's a process required to get there. I think that both of these, the process and the product, are very important. If you abandon the process, the product doesn't make any sense. We need to--

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

I'll stop you there, because I have only so much time.

I guess when I'm talking about the process, I'm talking about the process the farmer uses to grow the food. As long as the food's safe, as long as the consumer knows that when the Government of Canada stamps it, it's safe.... We actually would look back and say organic is a safe process then. We would say conventional farming, no-till farming, is a safe process.

When we look back at the Roundup wheat issue, I often wonder, if Monsanto would have brought out a trait that would have reduced fertilizer by 30%, or if it would have provided an intrinsic health benefit to insert that gene into wheat, what the scenario would have been. Again, the market really is the market. In this case, Roundup wheat never did come forward.

[Dr. Ian J. Mauro]

It was a strategic debacle on their part. You know, if a different wheat had come forward, there might have been a different outcome, for sure.

I think the point is that farmers are also concerned about these technologies being designed at a biological level to sell more herbicides. They're very critical of that. Introducing Roundup Ready wheat didn't make any sense. It was about selling more herbicides, and farmers saw that.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

Again, it's not a good example to take to the rest of the sector.

[Dr. Ian J. Mauro]

I agree.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

I think you made that point very clearly.

I guess that's it, so thank you.