Agriculture Committee on Dec. 16th, 2010

[Lorne Hepworth]

I would submit, Mr. Atamanenko, that it is exactly what the regulatory agencies do. They do stay on top of all the studies and work that goes on out there.

I want to pick up on your earlier comments about biotechnology being alive and well in Canada. You're right, and it's alive and well because we've had great regulation, solid science-based regulation that has been predictable and has allowed for investment.

Somehow there's the suggestion that it's our industry that was against this bill. Who appeared before this committee? Virtually every farm group that appeared before this committee was against the bill. So it's not just industry. I look at the Western Canadian Wheat Growers, the Canola Council, the Canola Growers Association, the Grain Farmers of Ontario, the food and consumer products manufacturing council, and the seed trade: all of them have the same view on it.

It was even academics who came before this committee. From the University of Saskatchewan, Dr. Phillips came before this committee and said had this bill been in place—and this is not me, this is the university speaking—the $3.3 billion, the “alive and well” investment in canola in Canada, would have been at risk.

I have one further comment, because it speaks to the work of this committee on a go-forward basis. My colleague here mentioned that the definition they use for plant biotechnology is CFIA's definition, which I totally accept. But I think what you're going to see as you go across Canada is that in plant breeding, the role of biotechnology and genomics is evolving and expanding, much like computer technology did.

As a good example, to get a base pair of DNAs done 10 or 15 years ago cost $3 million. Now you do it for $100. Since the mid-1990s, we've gone from plant breeding to transgenics, to irradiated mutagenesis, to chemical-induced mutagenesis, to marker-assisted breeding. I think what you're going to hear as a committee is more things about bioinformatics, because we spit out tremendous amounts of data now. I sit on the Genome Canada board—

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

I'm going to stop you there--

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

The time is up. I'm just waiting for the witness to finish.

[Lorne Hepworth]

Sorry, Mr. Chair.

You're going to hear more about bioinformatics, molecular markers, gene stacking, tilling, targeted mutagenesis, genomics, metabolomics, proteomics, epigenomics, all of those things. That's the new world out there.

My recommendation to the committee in that regard is that if that's what's coming at us in this new world, you need to stand back and look at that. I think that's what you're going to see when you go to these labs.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you, Mr. Hepworth.

Mr. Lemieux, you have seven minutes.

[Pierre Lemieux, Conservative, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

Thanks very much, Chair.

It's an interesting meeting today, because we have two very opposing and very contrasting opinions on biotechnology. I think it's important that both sides be heard.

I want to pick up on one point before I ask my questions. There have been comments made that somehow the government is not reviewing studies, is not doing research on these products. But they do. That's what government does. They look at the body of research. There's a regulatory mechanism in place, and part of that mechanism is consulting with scientists, with the research, and with the industry. I think it's incorrect to leave the impression that this is not the case.

I think what's important for Canadians to know is that these are science-based decisions and that health and safety issues, particularly if a product is going to be in the food system or in the animal feed system, are of primary importance—not secondary importance, primary importance. That's critical.

The other thing that should come out is that on the positive side of GM and GE products, the ones that are on the market are safe. Canola is in every single grocery store. I don't think there's any consumer who feels threatened by reaching for a container of canola oil. We sell canola around the world. It's a wildly successful product, developed here in Canada, which has penetrated foreign markets. It's a boon to our agricultural industry. To somehow paint it as some sort of negative type of venture by Canada or Canadian farmers I don't think does justice to what canola has done and how canola serves the consumer and the public.

That's where I want to go with my first question. I'll direct it to Lorne.

In your report you mentioned canola, corn, and soya. Could you elaborate on that? Or could you perhaps talk about some other products where GM or GE has actually benefited the consumer and our farmers?

[Lorne Hepworth]

Thank you.

I just want to pick up on the health, safety, and environmental observation in reference to some earlier discussion—I think maybe Mr. Valeriote raised it—about where there's common ground. We have some opposing views, but I think there's a lot of common ground around here and around your table.

First and foremost, we all want to make sure that technologies, whether they're pharmaceutical drugs or GMO crops, are used properly, responsibly, and they do not put at risk the health of the public or the environment. I think there's a pile of common ground there.

I think additionally there's a pile of common ground that if this stuff is going to be sold to farmers that it needs to work, that it's efficacious, and it's not some kind of snake oil, if you like. It has to work.

With the corn, the soybeans, the canola, the uptake by farmers has been phenomenal. It was probably considered revolutionary technology in the late twenties, when corn hybrid technology came to the marketplace. It had a huge adoption rate, and this has probably even exceeded that.

And there are some new traits we talked about that are coming in those sectors. I mean, I'm from western Canada and I still farm out there. Notwithstanding that we had a huge flood out there this year that wiped out ten million acres, I farm in the bottom of the middle of the Palliser Triangle. Most years, I'll tell you, I would love to have drought-tolerant crops; we're usually so dry the trees are chasing the dogs. Drought is usually our problem there, so that technology in Canada and elsewhere in the world can bring a huge benefit.

When you talk about common ground, once again, if climate change is coming at us—and farmers deal with climate every day, it's called weather—then to some degree, not totally, this technology is very much part of the answer for how we're going to deal with climate change on a go-forward basis.

For those of you who were at our conference a couple of weeks ago, you would have heard Dr. Skole, from the University of Michigan. He said our understanding of climate change is that if you're a wheat farmer in western Canada there are two tools you're going to need: farm practices and genomics. Those were the two tools that he pointed out are pivotal.

One final comment in terms of the common ground and safety and the environment and the rest of it. Lucy referenced the work she had done at CBAC, through one of the member organizations there. They spent two years studying biotech food. This is one of the conclusions of that CBAC committee report:

We conclude that no scientific evidence exists to suggest that GM plants and foods currently in the market pose any greater health or environmental risk than other foods.

In fact, they went on to say that arguably they “have undergone greater regulatory scrutiny than their conventional counterparts”.

I just wanted to pick up that point.

In terms of other products, Janice, did you want to...?

[Janice Tranberg]

I just want to mention that I was at an event that was celebrating a researcher at the University of Saskatchewan who was retiring. He made a comment that when he first came to Saskatchewan, when he drove across the fields, as he drove in he saw black, black, black—summer or fall. He said that was just ten years ago. We've now come to where you drive across Saskatchewan and you don't see that because we've been able to go to minimum and zero till. And a good part of that is due to some of the technologies we've brought forward in biotech.

[Pierre Lemieux, Conservative, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

Let me ask one last question in the few moments I have left.

Lucy, I want to ask something from your comments. Are you in favour of zero tolerance or not in favour of zero tolerance?

[Lucy Sharratt]

I was just pointing out that zero tolerance comes from this issue that some countries, say Canada even.... If we have not approved a GM crop for safety, then that's why zero tolerance exists, or any tolerance level. It relates to the regulatory decision. It actually has some grounds—

[Pierre Lemieux, Conservative, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

What would be your position on that, though? Do you think that policy is a good policy or not?

[Lucy Sharratt]

I would think it's up to countries to decide what they think is a tolerance level they can allow, either scientifically or politically. That would be based on what their population is willing to accept from contamination from a non-approved GM event, which is what we're talking about.

[Pierre Lemieux, Conservative, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

The point I want to bring up is that zero tolerance is a barrier to farmers. Let's take the whole GE and GM product and put it aside. When you look at crop handling, grain handling, it's so easy to cross-contaminate. There's a rail car. You just had soya in there and now you're putting corn in there. There's a bit of corn that was left when the soya went in. You've got a contamination problem.

Or you look at a storage facility. We just emptied the bin and there's a little bit of the previous product there. You've got a contamination problem.

When you go with zero tolerance, the problem is there's no accommodation for that, at all. It's even an enemy to organics, in a sense, because organics suffer from that. They've been so careful to grow their crop organically and there's a bit of contamination with something else on the truck or in the storage facility, or it's in the transportation systems.

[Lucy Sharratt]

It comes back to what I mentioned, which is that we really don't think that the segregation systems were given enough thought or really were invested in before the technology was allowed onto the market. There was some very necessary infrastructure. There were assumptions made that the EU opposition to genetic engineering, as it was seen, would collapse, that consumers would accept genetically engineered food, and that the controversy was going to go away. It's been a very complex controversy that continues.

[Pierre Lemieux, Conservative, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

I think there are ways around that. One of the ways around it is to work with low-level presence. Establish what's considered to be an acceptable low-level presence and then work with our trade partners on it, pointing out that when you have zero tolerance in place, you're not helping anybody. Suggest that we look at what would be considered to be acceptable low-level presence on a scientific basis.

[Lucy Sharratt]

If I may also respond to your question about this issue of safety, by bringing forward a critique or recommendations for improving the system for evaluating safety, we're not necessarily saying that the crops on the shelves now are not safe. That hasn't been said. New studies arising that point to potential problems are just valid scientific inquiry that needs to be pursued. There's such little publicly funded or independent science that studies warranting review are emerging just here and there. When we look at the science or this idea that Health Canada is reviewing any new science coming up, that's an assumption on our part, because that's not public information. This is one of the ongoing problems.

The fact that we're now looking at very complex genetically engineered organisms, like pigs.... And Health Canada, in 2005, abandoned the idea of developing new regulations specifically for GM animals. They say they're still developing them, yet there has been already, for a year and a half, an application in Health Canada for approval of a GM pig, for GM animals for human consumption. It's in this area that I think it's responsible to take a look at the evolving scientific knowledge and the evolving complexity of the GE organisms.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you.

Go ahead, Mr. Eyking. You have five minutes.

[Mark Eyking, Liberal, Sydney—Victoria, NS]

Thank you, Chair, and thank you, guests, for coming here today.

As a farmer and a person who's worked in underdeveloped countries helping farmers in these areas, I see the need for the research we're doing and the products we're developing, especially with all the coming challenges in the world, but I don't like when they start comparing altering food to how we should increase solar panels or efficiencies in cars. There's a big difference between research in food and altering our food compared to other products. In the international scene you often see protocols and conferences put together because we get in trouble in the international scene, whether it's nuclear arms or environment or even finances. As a world, we get so far down and then we have to ratchet back. I get a sense that this biotrain is moving quite fast.

That's good in a lot of ways, but I'd like to talk about international agreements or protocol when we have a framework in place. I think, Lucy, you talked a little about that country-to-country approach, maybe through bilateral agreements or whatever, but overall, if this is going to be such a success for our population and a world success for our Canadian farmers, how do we lead as a country in setting up an international protocol, an international gateway, on how we're dealing with this on the world scene, where you have a green light-red light on how you're doing things? Is that framework there? Should it be there? Should Canada take the lead on it, instead going out on its own and doing all this research and saying it's all great and fine and dandy? The other witnesses could comment on that as well. Where's it all at on the world scene on international protocols and framework? Where's it at, and where should it be going?

Lucy, I'll start with you.

[Lucy Sharratt]

I think there are a number of platforms from which the government ends up speaking about these issues with other countries. Certainly one of the platforms that was established, as was mentioned by Monsieur Bellavance, is the Cartagena protocol on biosafety. It's a protocol on biosafety under the Convention on Biological Diversity. That protocol is established to govern the international movement of living modified organisms, GMOs. Canada signed but never ratified that agreement. This is becoming a critical issue now that Environment Canada will be asked, or could already have been asked, to decide in 120 days that GE salmon eggs could be produced in Prince Edward Island and shipped to Panama. That's international shipping of a living modified organism, yet we haven't signed the international agreement. That's one thing Canada could do to participate in an existing international forum.

[Lorne Hepworth]

I'm going to ask my colleague to pick up on some of the international protocols, etc. I just want to reiterate one of the points I made in the presentation relative to the role we think Canada could play in this regard. And that is for Canada to establish a low-level presence policy and then advocate that policy to the rest of the world, because we desperately need that. If half the traits in the future are going to be coming from other countries, not even relative to our member companies globally, the potential for trade disruption's going to be huge. If there was one single message--and I think the committee heard that time and time again from virtually everybody who was here--it was that we need a low-level presence policy in Canada and globally.

My colleague has worked on some of the other stuff. I'd like her to have a comment.

[Janice Tranberg]

A lot of international bodies are working on this. For example, under Codex Alimentarius there's the agricultural biotechnology committee. They've developed a set of guidelines and standards on how to evaluate biotechnology products. They've also developed a low-level presence annex, and this defines some of the information that needs to be developed and looked at to come up with an approval on low-level presence. These are countries from around the world.

With the Convention on Biological Diversity, the interesting thing I heard from my colleagues who were just at the meeting in Nagoya, Japan, was they talked about this year being a game-changer. This year countries around the world discussed how to make it work. It was no longer that this is not a product we don't want to bring forward; it's that biotechnology can bring solutions. So how are we going to make it work?

Another thing I want to bring up is the transboundary movement on living modified organisms, or LMOs. The industry brought together something they're calling the compact. They believe the science behind the products they've brought forward is safe, the products are safe, and they're willing to stand behind that. The development of the compact is a very clearly defined and efficient process whereby countries can bring forward claims of damage to biological diversity.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you.

I'll move to Mr. Shipley, five minutes.

[Bev Shipley, Conservative, Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair and witnesses.

Mr. Hepworth, in one of your overviews and in your statement you said 90% of canola, 65% of soybeans, and 65% of corn grown in Canada are GM varieties. Obviously, they're grown because farmers make a choice, they see there's an advantage to it. I haven't heard of any health issues because these are in place, whether it's with livestock or humans.

Because 65% of the soybeans we grow are modified, does it mean we are not able to export to countries around the world identity preserved beans, for example, that are not genetically modified?

On my farm, quite honestly, we tend to grow IP soybeans. They are a farmer's choice. They make that choice based on premiums and a host of other things they want to do. Of the 25 countries you've talked about, do we not have any access to those other countries because we are now a GM producer? Second, were they always GM countries, or were those countries, because of science, continuing to grow...? Is that significant because Canada has been basing its evidence and its markets only on science?

[Lorne Hepworth]

You raised a couple of good points.

First, on the 25 countries, had we been coming before you three, four, or five years ago it was even fewer, and the number of acres it represented and the number of farmers in the developing part of the world was substantively less. I raise that in the context of that curve steadily rising, 6% or 7% on a compound annual basis, something in that order.

One of the issues I also raise that we didn't have a chance to get into in any detail is that other countries might be having traits developed in seeds that we don't grow here, like eggplant or cotton or some of those kinds of things, but they could impact us because we're importers. Then this gets into low-level presence issues and synchronous approvals, all those kinds of issues.

Your point about segregation and identity preservation is a really good one, because, as I recall, when canola was first commercialized, that's how they did it. They wanted to be really careful, so it was under contract growing and identity preservation and more sophistication in the marketplace—we won't ship until other major exporters have approved, etc.

So contracts and segregation have served us well in the past and continue to serve in some of these other markets very well as well.

[Lucy Sharratt]

If I may say, just very quickly, segregation did not work in canola. GE canola contaminated so widely that even pedigreed and certified seed stocks could not be certified as GM-free. That's the reason why over 90% of canola is GM and you can only grow organic canola or non-GE canola in geographically isolated areas like Prince Edward Island.