Agriculture Committee on Feb. 3rd, 2011

[Dr. Kofi Agblor]

Right.

So if the value is there, you do it; it comes down to value. And because lentils are highly profitable, it's very easy to do it; it is done with lentils. If you go to any of our traders or exporters, they have all the segregated beans. So the infrastructure can be put in place.

The question you want to answer is, when rationality and irrationality are colliding, do they create a path that indeed is the endgame? Will segregation be able to satisfy people, or are you beginning to deal with zero tolerance again? If we find one seed in a thousand, then your segregation is not working.

So be very careful, if you go down the road of segregation solely on the basis of the technology, as opposed to the quality and safety of the product. In our case, we do it with lentils because the value is there, and that's just how you do it. You can't sell a blend.

[Dr. Andrew Schmitz]

We were involved in a project in India recently on biofuels. I tried to find out about the perception of the people in India about lentils. As you know, they're the big buyer of lentils from Saskatchewan. Every time you go to the restaurant and eat soup, etc., it has a label of contents showing lentils in it. It was at least my reaction, or the reaction there, that they did not want to see any GMO lentils ever being shipped into India. That was interesting.

[André Nault]

Had the appropriate studies been conducted from the beginning, we would perhaps not be asking ourselves whether labels are needed.

The first independent scientific study was conducted by Arpad Pusztai in 1998. This gentleman was ostracized by the industry and expelled from his institution for discussing GMO-related safety issues in his report. Had science been given its due, we would perhaps not be discussing, as we are today, labelling or seed segregation.

[Éric Darier]

I would like to add, very quickly...

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

I'm sorry, Mr. Darier, the time is up.

Mr. Lemieux, you have seven minutes.

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

Thanks very much, Mr. Chair.

And thank you for taking time out of your day to come in front of the committee today to talk about biotechnology and how it can impact our agricultural sector.

One point I would make, of course, is that although genetically modified products are part of biotechnology, they're not all of biotechnology. One of the things we're going to have to keep in mind as a committee is that—we talk about GM products, of course—we not focus only on GM products, because there's a lot more going on in the biotechnology sector.

There are the two extremes. The one extreme would be that biotech should rule everything, and then the other extreme would be that it shouldn't touch anything. In between is, I think, where the committee is, and the question is, where does biotechnology help agriculture and where does it not help agriculture?

With some of the discussion we had today.... Certainly, Mr. Schmitz, you brought up, for example, the fact that the consumer has an important role to play. This is a discussion that we've had. Science has to dominate the argument, because the fundamental question is whether the end product is safe for human consumption, yes or no. Science plays a very fundamental role in that, and as a result scientific assessments, scientific procedures to determine that question are extremely important.

But the other side of it is of course consumer acceptance.

Mr. Schmitz, you mentioned trying to get consumer opinion on this matter. Did you have particular mechanisms in mind, a coherent and cogent way of doing that?

[Dr. Andrew Schmitz]

No, but I've also done work with some colleagues with respect to the oil spill in the gulf, so we actually have a methodology by which you can determine the damages from an oil spill, what we call compensating and equivalent variation measures. This was also the application on the Exxon Valdez oil spill years ago.

There are ways you can get at consumer acceptability, but the trouble is you have to tell me what you're asking the consumers to respond to. You just can't go to consumers and ask, would you buy GMO products? You have to be very specific on, for example, what would a seed company release and what traits would it have before the consumers even ask that question.

I have some colleagues who did some work on Japan versus Canada and some other countries with respect to GMOs. They found, obviously, that with respect to GMOs, Japan is one of the toughest countries to deal with. That is still likely true. I think they could have done much better work, depending upon their budget, to find out exactly how the response was, rather than do the survey work they did. A lot of those surveys are interesting, but I don't rely on many of the results from survey work on acceptability.

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

One of the risks of trying to seek public opinion is you can have groups that say they represent public opinion and they might have a very strong voice on the matter, but do they? My actual thought is that the consumer plays a fundamental role when he or she purchases the final product.

In Canada we have diversity among consumers. We have consumers who are very organic. They will buy organic product. Perfect. You have the freedom to do that. We have others who will buy canola oil. Great, buy the canola oil. In Europe it is a little more continentally divided, meaning that in Canada we have canola oil and over there they wouldn't necessarily want a GM product or a hormone-enhanced product. So sometimes you can draw boundaries by regions or countries as to what the consumer will actually do, but my thought on the matter is the consumer ultimately decides.

Farm groups, farmers, the agricultural sector has to decide if this is of net benefit to their sector.

Mr. Agblor, I think this is where you were going when you were saying in the pulse crop sector you don't have customers for GM pulse crops so you're not growing them. If you had a customer, or if you felt this was something that would appeal strongly to the consumer, you would certainly have a close look at this.

I wonder if you might want to comment on that balance you're looking at, which is consumer acceptance versus actually embracing that aspect of biotechnology.

[Dr. Kofi Agblor]

Biotechnology will be key to feeding the world in the future. There is no doubt about that. However, as to whether most of those traits will go into the plant by genetic engineering transfer of genes, I don't know what proportion of those traits will require that.

If you look at nitrogen use efficiencies, when we can use less nitrogen and get the same yield, it will have a happy impact on climate change and drought issues. I've seen the photos of plants that are stressed with drought and produce a normal yield. You look at a plethora of those traits. We will need to use more and more of those. It is explaining to the public. In Australia when the poll was done on if we were to introduce a water-use efficiency—which is what we should be saying, not drought stress—gene in wheat, would you support it, 70% of Australians said yes. Consumers saw value, or the citizens saw value, in a trait in terms of maximizing a resource that they don't have. That is how we have to approach it.

In the first instance, it was industry-led. We have a chemistry to sell. We introduce a trait, and without educating the people on the benefits of that single pass—you don't have to do five sprays and all that to kill the weeds—and the environmental benefits, the train left the station with the goods on it before the public got onboard. But in future you need to be proactive and engage the public on trait-specific and say that we could maximize yield with half the nitrogen we use now. It takes half a billion cars off the road. Do the math. We can tell you that with green peas and lentils you save enough natural gas to heat 132,000 prairie homes for one year, and you know how cold it gets on the prairies. Those are the kinds of things that will resonate with the public.

If we adopt that approach I think that is a way, but we need biotechnology and we have to define it for what it is. It is not all GMO. Probably only 10% or 20% of the traits we have today in crops are actually GMO. The rest are just biotechnology tools.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you very much.

[Éric Darier]

Since your committee will be visiting various campuses next week, I simply wanted to point out that Agriculture Canada has excellent research institutes on wheat, among others. The institutes have been subsidized by Canadian taxpayers. A lot of research is being conducted at these institutes, such as the Université Laval in Quebec City. Unfortunately, over the years, this research has been decreasing in favour of companies like Monsanto, an American company, which have commercial interests in marketing GMOs rather than other products. However, there are already many other very interesting methods that do not require gene transfers into another plant. I strongly encourage you to meet with people from Agriculture Canada's research laboratories who are working on conventional wheat and who are getting very interesting results.

We should also look at genomics, which are indirectly related, but are present. We shouldn't put all our eggs into one basket, the gene transfer basket that, to tell the truth, is controversial from the consumers' point of view and represents only a minute part of genomics' benefits.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you.

Mr. Eyking, you have five minutes.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I thank the witnesses for coming today. It's quite a broad spectrum.

Recently in The Economist there was an article concerning the future food crisis that more or less stated that the world has gone through an economic crisis a bit, but that the food crisis is next and is going to be just as challenging—more challenging, definitely—than the economic crisis.

When we sit around the table, as the western world 20% of us are fortunate enough to have lots of food, and we can make decisions and choices about our food. The other 80% of the world just go day to day getting their food.

If this crisis happens—it is happening now, and we see it—although we should have been ahead of the curve with the economic crisis, if we're going to be ahead of the curve with this food crisis when we have to feed ten billion people, I see biotechnology as probably one of the few tools or the best tool to help avoid some of the problems, especially with world climate changes and distribution.

It has been stated that the more local food we can get produced, the better we're going to be able to adapt. For that to happen, you're going to have to have varieties and things like that.

Often we're looking through our own lens at our own consumers, our own tastes, our own concerns. But shouldn't the powers that be look at how we are going to start growing crops in the sub-Sahara or in parts of Africa or India or wherever? Shouldn't we be coming to grips with that? How do we come to grips with it, and how is biotech going to deal with it? And what leadership role should we be taking in that kind of way?

I will just open it up and I would hope everybody will have a few minutes.

[Dr. Andrew Schmitz]

Here are a couple of comments. First of all—and it may be the answer to this other gentleman too—you have to remember that there are some GMOs that really you have to accept and that there's no controversy over. BT Cotton, for example, was a huge breakthrough. You don't consume cotton, so there's no controversy on some of these. You can't let the problem with categorizing in general.... There are some real success stories just like this.

But on the food thing, I think there are huge areas yet to be done with respect to breeding rices that aren't GMO rices. This is a huge area, but IRRI, etc. are working on some different type of rices, and they're also trying to develop the iron content in the rice. I think it will have a huge payoff.

The other thing is, I believe more in the Chicago school of economics. I'm not a government interventionist type, necessarily. Markets usually take care of themselves. We've always had poor people, starving people. That's almost a different area from our trying to feed the world in what we do—population growth, etc.—because we have commercial demand, and somebody has to pay for this food yet.

We had a conference two years ago, and everybody asked the same question—where is this food market headed?—when wheat futures got over $12 a bushel and we thought we farmers were going to live in heaven forever. All of a sudden the markets all collapsed, until this spring. Now we're back into this price spiral. But you see, that isn't all necessarily with technology; it's also with respect to government policy, because government policy at one time got involved also in holding food stocks. They avoid all this instability.

Then we dropped that argument under the U.S. Farm Bill, whereby now we're no longer required to hold wheat when the prices get below what they call the loan rate. That's something we should look into too in relation to this food crisis. It isn't all on increasing supply and trying to increase production; it's also to do with management and what we do with this huge weather instability that's out there at the present.

But I have a forecast: don't buy a bunch of farmland in Saskatchewan on the basis of these prices that exist at the present time.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Mr. Darier, you had your hand up next. You have one minute.

[Éric Darier]

Yes, the food crisis is indeed a very serious issue. I think we should remember that there are currently no GMOs designed specifically, in terms of gene transfer, to increase yield. Most of it is herbicide resistance or produces pesticides. I think that's the reality of this.

Secondly, all the international NGOs who have been in the field in the south working on those issues will tell you that sometimes the very little answers can have the best impact. It's not necessarily putting new technology on the market. Several years ago an international organization of the UN did an extensive report, which looked at solutions adapted continent to continent. In most cases, GMOs were not the key elements to address and solve the food crisis.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you.

Mr. Gold, you had a comment.

[Richard Gold]

Yes.

My research group works extensively in Africa with some of the large centres and researchers, and there's an awful lot of interest in biotechnology. They see this as a way to deal with both health and their future food needs, and they're putting a lot of resources into it. They want to have more partnerships. This is an opportunity for Canada, for Canadian biotech companies to be involved, because they're looking for access to financing knowledge about regulatory systems. They want to work with our universities. Anything we can do to help will benefit us economically, but also help them solve their own food issues.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

We're out of time, Mr. Nault, but I'm going to allow you, if you're very brief.

[André Nault]

I will be very brief.

The green revolution that was supposed to feed the world has not succeeded in doing so, and I don't think that biotechnologies will succeed either.

However, the ability to grow our own food locally is the most important issue. We must stop making food travel all over the world. We must achieve food self-sufficiency at home.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Mr. Hoback, five minutes.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

Thank you, Chair.

First of all, I want to apologize to Dr. Agblor and Dr. Schmitz. I understand they grow pulses, and we have no pulses on the table back there, Chair, which is just horrible. We should have pulses. We're looking for protein.

Anyway, thank you for coming. I really appreciate your taking the time out of your schedules. I think leaving Florida to come here must be a little bit of a step backwards, maybe, but we all love Saskatchewan in the summer, so I can understand why you're there in the summer for sure, Dr. Schmitz. That's where I'm going to go with you first.

You talked about the StarLink corn, and I'm curious. If we had had low-level presence back then when that was ongoing, how would that have been impacted?

[Dr. Andrew Schmitz]

I'm not sure. The impact.... You asked me what the impact the StarLink corn has...?

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

Yes. One of the suggestions around here is that we need to get a low-level presence out--1% or 0.5%, I'm not sure what the number is; there are people smarter than I am who can figure that out. But the suggestion is that we need some tolerance in the system to allow for foreign content.

[Dr. Andrew Schmitz]

That's where this comes up; it was really brought up in this case. In the StarLink corn case, when they found StarLink in the corn supplies when the farmers sued Aventis, the issue there was trading with the Japanese, and the corn market took the big hit as soon as they discovered there was StarLink in the corn system. Colin Carter and Al Lyons and some others did some excellent work on a really rigorous analysis of the impact the StarLink case had.

The reason that was so dramatic is the sense of the cost of segregation also came up. There's zero tolerance, right? It's costly when you have zero tolerance when you start commingling products. They were shortening up these markets with huge--