Thank you.
Biotechnology is one of the tools that we use in agriculture and bioresources to address the really critical issues that are in front of us right now. It takes 10 years to develop a new plant variety, 10 years from the moment you conceive of the idea of what's needed until you can actually release that variety.
When we're looking at the world, we see that the global population will have increased by 50% by 2050. We'll have over 9 billion people by 2050, and we have no idea what's happening with climate. However, all of the climates we have right now that we can provide agricultural product for exist somewhere in the world, so it almost doesn't matter what climate we get.
Saskatchewan has over 43% of the arable land in this country. This province is critically important to the future of agriculture and bioresources. We use biotechnology, and we clearly understand that it's far more than just GMOs.
What the politicians and the policy-makers really need to do is assess the balance of good and risk in all of the technologies that are being used and all of the products that are coming out, in order to address the critical needs of our population in our country as well as the global population--and not just for food, but for the bioproducts of fibre, for fuel, for clean air, and for carbon capture. All of those pieces are part of biotechnology and are influenced by it.
What is the role of the university in the agricultural biotech sector? First of all, we're actually assumed to be an honest broker of solid information that can inform the public. We also provide research for the public good. It is not commercial research, but public good research, meaning that when we release a plant variety, having gone through all of the appropriate effort, farmers can use that seed, grow a crop, harvest a crop, and then take the seed from that crop, save some of it, and use it the next year. Corporations, because they make their money selling seed, have to sell seed that essentially cannot be harvested and renewed, because they'll lose their profits.
Canola is a hybrid crop. The corporations have the two parent varieties. They produce a hybrid seed. That's the seed that's released to producers. Producers will plant that and harvest the crop. The crop has all the excellent traits, but farmers can't keep any seed from it because it won't breed true the next year. Other crops may be bred deliberately by commercial operations to be sterile if replanted. When a university breeds plants and releases them, it's public good research. That's the definition of public good research. All of the investment comes in up front, and we're not charging for it at the far end, so again, it's the choice that has to be made.
We can undertake long-term, risky, and speculative research like the kind that led to the development of canola and pulses. Corporations have to generate income for their shareholders, so they cannot undertake the kind of risky research that we can, yet without the research that led to the development of canola, we wouldn't have it as a crop these days.
We also innovate and generate new knowledge, including those “eureka” things, the ones that you just stumble across. Those are the things we are best known for.
The critical thing we do that nobody else does is train future minds. We train the biotechnologists. We provide the learning skills--we teach how to learn--and we provide the link between disciplines and between ethics, science, and culture. Community colleges give you discrete skills; we give you learning and the ability to figure out how to learn. We stimulate that when we do it the best way we can.
In medical innovation within our university, agriculture and bioresources is working with the nutrition department and pharmacy and industry. We are literally building a research chair together to look at the human good that will come out of biofortified pulse crops to provide unlimited metals for public good. Again, these are the kinds of things we can do that nobody else can.
When we look at biotech, we can see that in this province we work in an incredibly effective research cluster. It is amazing. I came from Guelph--I was 20-some years at Guelph--and the effectiveness of the cluster here is absolutely astounding.
It took me months to figure out who worked for whom, because we move back and forth so readily that it was really confusing. It's a feature of this unique cluster that we work so well together, including Agriculture Canada, the NRC, VIDO-InterVac, the Saskatchewan Research Council, Alberta Gentech, and the B.C. dairy industry. It's all of those pieces, and we do all of that together.
We do plant breeding and selection, and yes, we've done GMOs, but we do it far better than that. We take apart the genome and the genetics, we understand what the genes can do, and then we select plants that have those genes naturally and enhance the operation of those plants.
We do animal and human health, including the development of drugs and vaccines, enzymes, probiotics, omega-3 eggs, and omega-3 enriched milk. That's because we can link to the product the foods that the animals take in and the health benefits that come to the people who eat that product. Those are the things we can provide when we export internationally as well.
We are also very involved in technology development. We take the plants that have the genetic traits and feed them to the animals that we know have the genetic traits to allow them to get the most good out of them. We then take those products and develop the actual oil extraction and protein extraction in all of those different ways to enable us to produce the product, which we can then sell abroad, or we can actually sell the technology as well as use it to develop our own products here for Canadian use or Canadian benefit.
These improved or novel crops and the high-value animal protein are the things that the rest of the world needs and wants. Our emerging partners, such as China, India, and Kazakhstan--you name these countries--are coming to us because of what we can do in biotechnology and in terms of the links to the technology of how to do it.
How do we maintain our soils? What are the microbes that will take that soil from tar sand and enable that soil to grow plants? For stressed soils in the north, or non-soils in the north, what are the values in the rocks that are there that enable us to produce a crop or grow the animals or...? I keep on telling my plant breeders that we need to look at how to grow wild rice in Saskatchewan these days, but we also need to work with our indigenous peoples so that they can use their lands in ways that they understand and know.
We learn from them, and then we work together to help them with different animal products, such as caribou, bison, and ground animals, and plants such as cranberries. What are their lands becoming? These are the things that we can use our biotechnology to develop. We use tissue culture for horticulture crops and, again, we can use that as well.
There are difficulties that we have specifically at the university level. First of all, there is the misunderstanding of the public of what biotechnologies are and what we do. We also have the whole problem of non-tariff trade barriers; flax is certainly one of those. My math says that .00 is zero, but the argument is not about science internationally; the argument is about barriers.
We also have a need for expensive infrastructure to maintain our animals in ways that abide by the Canadian Council on Animal Care. They're hugely expensive. We need them to train our veterinarians, to develop our vaccines, to train our students, and to enable us to do that holistic approach to agriculture from the soil right through to the end product. Anything we can do to help you get the message across and to help us to get the students in the door and as excited as we are about agriculture and biotechnologies, we would really appreciate.
Thanks for your time.