In a generation, Canada has gone from zero in the production of pulses other than beans to being the world's leading producer, not only in the production but also in the export of pulses. This year we produced about 4.5 million metric tonnes in Saskatchewan alone. That would be mainly peas and lentils. Last year, $2.2 billion worth of pulses were exported from Canada, of which $1.8 billion came from our province.
Most of this success has been possible because of the tripartite group--made up of the University of Saskatchewan, the Ministry of Agriculture of Saskatchewan, and the Saskatchewan Pulse Growers--funding research at the university. The growers have commercial rights to all the varieties that are developed at the university, so we determine whether we will release a variety to the growers. We have that right. Because the university is a public institution, they were able to negotiate those exclusive rights to us. In return, we put back funding into the program from a levy of 1% that our growers pay. If you consider other crops, I'm sure those growers are paying more than 1% for the development of technology.
We feel that research and development is the greatest asset we have. It has made a return of $20 for every dollar that the growers have put in. In genetics, it is $28 in return for every one.
We do not have GMOs in pulses at this time, because we feel that our markets do not want them. The signal we get from the market is that they are not interested in a GMO pulse. We've always said, and I've always said, that if India releases a GMO chickpea, we will work on a GMO pea.
Biotechnology is a tool, and it should only be used if it's the most appropriate tool to give you what you need. It's not something that you apply.... It's like plumbing; you don't plumb every part of your house, right? Biotechnology is a tool.
For us, with the kinds of threats we face, most of those threats cannot be addressed by GMOs. Disease resistance is not a trait that pays a lot of money. A chemical firm will not develop disease-resistant strains because then they won't sell you the fungicide to spray. That's why we are concerned with declining resources from the public side of funding research and development. Not only that, but we are concerned that when those resources are available, we'll target them to a particular part of science--applied, pre-commercial.
We believe that the way into the future is to define your problem, do your needs assessment, identify the gaps, and provide resources to develop the knowledge and technologies to address those gaps. It does not matter the spectrum of science, whether it's fundamental, whether it's basic, whether it's applied; if that is pertinent to the solution, you should do that.
We've always felt also that plants with novel traits regulations in Canada are not friendly to smaller crops. It could cost you up to $200,000 to demonstrate a trait for feed use only. If you put it as a food use, it escalates. If you look at the span of crops we have in Canada, if you take the world's top ten by size, by tonnage, wheat might be the only crop in Canada that would make that list. It tells you, then, that industry investment in crops is always by the size you sell. Take the number of seeds, multiply that by the acres, and make your money, or sell a chemical, times the number of acres, and make your money.
We in this country have always based our productivity on the quality. We still have an environment in the west of 120 days frost-free, and we have to design our genetics to meet that.
We think that plants with novel traits, the way they are now, are certainly not very conducive to that and should be looked at again. The public helps bring new traits into the market.
We think that into the future, biotic stresses are going to be key. As the climate changes or the variability in the weather becomes unpredictable, the impact on productivity will be quite harsh, and we will need all the genetics.
What we see in the future is genomics. We believe that understanding a plant's genome and knowing the genes that are in there will give our breeders the tools they need to bring new traits into the marketplace. Some of those traits may come by way of transgenics, but by and large most of my breeders have told me that with genomics they think they can get what they want in pulse crops without GMOs. That's what they have said. But we also think that the public has not responded to the funding of genomics to the extent that other countries have. Look at the United States. It has determined crops as strategic and at the federal level has gone ahead and sequenced.
Sequencing is only one part of the equation. It's very cheap now. The right technologies that can sequence a genome are under $50,000. When you get those millions of reads, making sense of that, bringing that down to a level breeders can use, is where it is at. We are investing in the National Research Council Plant Biotechnology Institute to put a position in place in bioinformatics to get that kind of translation for our breeders. We think that should have been done by the public.
In conclusion, we view GMOs as a tool that we will only apply when the market is right. We have our signals from the market on an ongoing basis. It's the market that will determine that. A regulatory approach may be a pre-emptive strike that will serve no purpose. I think that every industry in Canada, be it wheat or canola or pulses, has groups that are looking out at the marketplace. And if the signal is that we will take it, I'm sure they will go ahead and develop a technology for it.
We feel strongly, though, that genomics is the way to go in Canada. We have fairly small crops, outside of wheat and canola. There isn't a lot of industry investment on the private sector side for most of our crops. The public should step up, invest in genomics, and let our breeders have the tools they need to develop the traits on the genetic side that will cope with our future climate.
Thank you.