Evidence of meeting #47 for Agriculture and Agri-Food in the 40th Parliament, 3rd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was biotechnology.
A recording is available from Parliament.
12:35 p.m.
Conservative
12:35 p.m.
Conservative
Bev Shipley Conservative Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you to our witnesses.
I'm from Ontario, and I've had a number of great meetings with commodity organizations. We don't grow many lentils or peas right where I am, but that being said, we do grow a lot of corn, soybeans, wheat, and edible beans.
I'll go to Mr. Schmitz. I'll ask you for help, because I think we all need it in terms of how we communicate. I think there are two issues. It was mentioned earlier today that we sometimes have a fear factor that goes out, and we'll make the worst scenario so that we get a bad push. I don't agree with that scenario. I think we have to be balanced. We have to have science. That's what our basis is. As far as marketing goes, give farmers credit: quite honestly, they're not going to grow something they can't market. They aren't going to grow something if they don't have the research and development. That's actually what our grain farmers are saying about why a partnership developed. With Mr. Gold and Mr. Schmitz and Mr. Agblor, we've talked about developing these partnerships among universities, the growers, and the industry.
We're developing products, and we say we shouldn't be using these for commerce or to generate energy or whatever. The interesting part is that, based on the research one of my growers is showing me--and I'm a farmer also--at the end of the day, we will generate energy. We will generate a product for commercial industry. We may even generate products for pharmaceutical use. At the end of the day, we still have food, because now the research has been able to pull apart—let's use corn for example--in the energy development of ethanol.
Everyone has heard for a number of years--and somebody's always been putting it out--that GMO, genetically modified, is bad stuff. Nobody seems to understand genomics. That sounds a little softer. So how do we communicate, quite honestly, that not everything is right, and not everything is wrong? In the dairy industry, which I was in, in Canada, we did not accept BST. We have a sovereign right to do that, thank you.
How do we communicate those types of things to the people?
We do have a number of our younger families.... I don't read the labels, but my daughter does. Getting them to understand it is the other part.
How do we communicate that clearly? Could I have any ideas, please, from the three of you? Because it is an important aspect.
12:40 p.m.
Professor, Food and Resource Economics Department, University of Florida
Let me give you an example. Suppose that somebody reads a report, which isn't available from Monsanto, on why genetically modified wheat may be the way to go or on releasing this wheat. If this is really true, and it might be, you have to give people in the public information also. It can't always just be private information in terms of whether this is acceptable, right? So then to communicate, what you need to do, almost, is get an objective body from another side, which is not part of the seed companies, and so on, which push their agenda, to try to show who the gainers and losers are from this whole thing.
In the U.S., ethanol is a mess. That whole ethanol system in the U.S., in my opinion, is when you really get the farm lobbyist groups involved. In my opinion, most academics, at least, really do not support at all the ethanol program in the U.S. They make this argument: Why do you produce corn with energy and use corn again to produce energy? It's all over the map, depending on which expert you talk to, as to whether there are any benefits from ethanol. How you communicate that to the average person I have no idea. An average person might say that if corn goes up 50¢ a bushel or 60¢ a bushel because of ethanol, it has to be a bad thing for me from a food supply point of view. Furthermore, they'd argue that it has no impact on the fuels market. So why are we doing it? Obama's got himself in a real bind or a problem with these energy prices and how to deal with these tax credits now for the oil producers.
I agree with you that you have to communicate, but it's tough. If farm groups think that there's a bottom line in it for money, they don't really need the time to communicate with anybody either. It's a matter of convincing politicians to do it.
12:40 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Larry Miller
You just have a couple of seconds left.
Mr. Gold wanted to speak.
12:40 p.m.
Professor, Faculty of Law, McGill University, As an Individual
Sorry to jump in.
There have been, actually, some good efforts. There's a science media centre that now exists in Ottawa. Preston Manning has his organization in the west. We in the research community have made greater efforts to communicate. I've participated in a science cafe on biotechnology.
It's about encouraging people to actually intervene. Reading a label gives you very little information. If you don't actually understand the technology, they don't mean anything. You might be overly willing to buy the product or not willing to buy the product, without really being educated about it.
Biotechnology is not scary. It's not all that complicated. It just needs to be explained. The research community is probably your best resource.
12:40 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Larry Miller
Okay, thank you.
We should actually be breaking now, but I'm going to give Mr. Easter one question and Mr. Hoback one question. But keep it brief.
12:40 p.m.
Liberal
Wayne Easter Liberal Malpeque, PE
Yes. Well, I really had about three, Mr. Chair.
Anyway, one of the justifications for feeding a hungry world is the need for more production. I guess I'd ask you, Andrew, what role production really plays. There's the whole issue of crop losses, storage losses, transportation to markets, waste in storage, and you name it. There's a huge area there.
On the issue at hand, one of the big confusing areas is the difference between GMOs and biotechnology. On biotechnology and the confusion, I'd ask whoever can answer it. Biotechnology isn't exclusively GMOs. How do we get around that?
12:40 p.m.
Professor, Food and Resource Economics Department, University of Florida
Well, I think you get around it, for example, with the trade the gentleman who just left is involved in. I think the trade very well knows that the product they're actually buying is biotech and is not a GMO product. When we deal with the Japanese, they know exactly what they're buying when it comes to buying wheat from Canada, and that's why they buy here. When you get this whole thing comingled, and so on, these buyers don't know where it comes from. They likely wouldn't even buy any non-GMOs. You have to buy GMOs and non-GMOs. You have to segment the markets, and so on.
The grain companies all trade with the specs already specified, and these buyers generally know it. That's, to me, very clear.
12:40 p.m.
Conservative
12:40 p.m.
Conservative
Randy Hoback Conservative Prince Albert, SK
Mr. Schmitz, you talked about how your farm has adapted from wheat and barley to pulses. We've seen tremendous growth in pulses. In fact, you talked about your daughter's farm and how she's gone to canola, and canola in problem cases.
12:45 p.m.
Professor, Food and Resource Economics Department, University of Florida
Yes. It's not the right area.
12:45 p.m.
Conservative
Randy Hoback Conservative Prince Albert, SK
Yes.
We're seeing in the wheat sector, especially, that acreage has dropped. I have my theories, but how do you view wheat?
12:45 p.m.
Professor, Food and Resource Economics Department, University of Florida
In our area, wheat was once king, and even this year with the wheat prices up.... But then you've got to recognize that canola has hit through the roof and you've got these other crops that have increased maybe even faster. So everybody's looking for this big expansion of wheat acreage, right? It likely isn't going to happen.
12:45 p.m.
Professor, Food and Resource Economics Department, University of Florida
The second thing is we just found it not profitable compared to the other crops because the yields were never great. We had drought, etc. So it was just the economics of that area with the effect of pulse--
12:45 p.m.
Conservative
Randy Hoback Conservative Prince Albert, SK
So how do we deal with rotations? Because we need to keep a rotation to keep things healthy.
12:45 p.m.
Professor, Food and Resource Economics Department, University of Florida
Well, you see, in my opinion a lot of the better farmers who are still farming don't even listen to some of these discussions about mixing crops depending on prices of commodities. I always find that a lot of the good farmers actually have a rotation they deal with now, and of course that's where lentils and peas, etc., fit perfectly in their rotation crop, because of less nitrogen in the crop. So a lot of people in our area have a rotation, and they're not going to change that rotation very much, depending on the relative price of crops.
12:45 p.m.
Conservative
Randy Hoback Conservative Prince Albert, SK
I guess my concern is guys who are cheating the rotation because of profitability. When it gets tighter on the margins you see that they start doing canola on canola and some things they probably shouldn't do.
12:45 p.m.
Professor, Food and Resource Economics Department, University of Florida
Yes, that's what happened this year.
12:45 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Larry Miller
Thank you very much, gentlemen. We could carry this on all day, I'm sure, and I wish we could.
I wasn't trying to cut anybody off at any time. Sometimes our own members forget that their five or seven minutes include the question and the answer. I'm very liberal with the time, but the more I give, the more everybody expects.
Anyway, thank you very much for coming here today, and I'm sure we will run into you somewhere in our travels. So thank you very much.
I have to ask everybody not connected to committee members or staff to please exit the room. We have to go in camera to deal with some business.
Thank you.
[Proceedings continue in camera]