Agriculture Committee on Feb. 7th, 2011

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

I come from eastern Ontario, right beside Ottawa, and there was a time when soy was not grown there, just because it didn't have the traits for the climate found in my region; now it's an extremely important product that's grown by farmers across my riding, just because the plant has now been modified to be better suited to the environment in eastern Ontario.

It's good to know that the product is being integrated now into processed foods quite safely, and the consumer is quite happy consuming it.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

We'll have one last comment.

Goahead, Ms. Buhr.

[Dr. Mary Buhr]

One very simple example, as well, of a non-GMO biotech is almost any of the plants that you buy to put in your garden in the springtime. They have been developed by tissue culture, which is growing identical plants from the cells of one plant. That's biotech, but that's not GMO. I'll bet you that in any garden store where you buy your pansies or your coleus or umpteen dozen different plants, those plants are produced through tissue culture. That's biotech; it's not GMO.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you.

Okay, we'll have one last comment.

[Bert Vandenberg]

I can give you one more food example. This is very common in the world of legumes. The legume crops that I work with were not very conducive to using the transgenic technologies because of technical difficulties. Our position was therefore to transfer genes from relatives of those crops, so we've transferred disease resistances from some of the relatives of the bean crop. The result of that has been going through the tissue culture system and rescuing embryos. We've been able to produce new bean varieties for which we use fewer pesticides.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you.

I didn't mean to cut you off there. I thought you were finished.

Mr. Easter, you have five minutes.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Thank you, Chair.

I wonder if we might suggest to our Library of Parliament folks that they could do some research for us on the public funding of research. We'd have to go back 25 years, because I think it was in 1996 or so that we went to matched funding. We'd need the comparison between public research, private research, and the combination of the two in Canada back over 25 years, vis-à-vis that in the United States and maybe some other country, just so we'd have some data to work from.

We're growing canola on P.E.I. now too, and it's a non-GM canola. We have a premium market in Japan, which allows both GM canola and non-GM canola. The company that imports this product is very fussy. They come over to P.E.I. and inspect whether there's potential for contamination from GM canola and so on.

That brings up the issue of labelling. I forget who it was, but somebody mentioned it earlier. If they weren't labelling GM products in Japan, we wouldn't be in that market. That's for sure.

Where are you folks on labelling? It's a controversial issue.

[Dr. Jill Hobbs]

I could address that issue. The controversial issue with labelling is the question of mandatory versus voluntary.

I'm arguing that there is no such thing as an average consumer. Markets are differentiated. I would be on the side of voluntary labelling. If you have companies that wish to sell products that are GM-free, and there's a market premium for those, then they would label them and consumers could move to those products.

I think having a clear set of organic standards now in Canada has been helpful in terms of defining what organics are. Sometimes having standards that define the products is an important part of labelling.

The big challenge we see in Europe is moving to mandatory labelling, which in essence imposes costs on anyone who wants to prove that their product is not GM and so forth. I think voluntary labelling allows consumers who want to pay for that product to go into the market and buy it.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Does anybody else have anything to add on that? I think somebody said earlier that people don't read labels anyway.

Go ahead, Andrew.

[Dr. Andrew Potter]

It's just a comment. I don't think one can talk about communication without that sort of information being available to a consumer. Let them decide, at the end of the day.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

I heard someone say the other day that if it's so good, why doesn't somebody put on “certified GMO product” in big bold print? I thought that was an interesting comment.

The other side of the coin--and some of you alluded to it or mentioned it--is how slow and cumbersome our regulatory system is versus anybody else's. Whether it's on an immigration question or on AgriFlex or anything else, if you want to see people frustrated with the regulatory side, talk to any one of us in our MP offices. We can tell you how bad it is.

Why is that? It doesn't matter whether it's CFIA.... Andrew mentioned AgriFlex. To me, an application under AgriFlex should be a simple six-week affair. What's your experience there? It is something we have to address as a country, because we are losing out everywhere else because our system is so slow. I can understand on the research side why companies go to the midwestern United States. That's a big market. If we're going to do it, we have to look at it in microclimates like P.E.I. or the Annapolis Valley, or like the climates in southern or northern Saskatchewan.

Who would like to answer?

[Dr. Andrew Potter]

On AgriFlex, I don't know what to say. We have an application in, and it's approaching a year. I haven't heard a word.

There are other agencies. Genome Canada was mentioned by somebody. They move very quickly, so it can be done. I don't know why that particular one is....

On the regulatory side, CFIA has become so risk-averse that it's not a question of how much risk there is anymore; we're told to prove it's safe. Well, you can't do that.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

I can assure you that the Larsen plant in Nova Scotia basically closed down because of one CFIA inspector who was dotting the i's and crossing the t's. It was impossible.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Go ahead, Mr. Wartman.

[Mark Wartman]

Also on the CFIA, I have a complete lack of understanding of why they would go to a long list for specified-risk materials in the beef industry when we have had a North American industry for decades and we're supposed to compete with the U.S. market, where they're doing a short list of specified-risk materials. Why not take that extra step and look at the impact on our industry? There was no moving them; that was their decision, and that's the way it was going to be, period.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

That was pushed for by the beef industry to try to qualify for some of those foreign markets they went after. Was it successful? I'm not convinced that it was, but I think that was the reason behind it.

Mr. Hoback, you have the last five minutes.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

This has definitely been educational. I think a lot of us have learned a lot more about what's going on. I really look forward to the tours this afternoon. I think they will open our eyes. When you can touch something, you can get a better feel for what's actually going on.

I want to touch on the education side of things, and on whose role it is to provide that education—not only education of consumers, but of our students, bringing the kids forward.

Mary, maybe I'll start with you. How do we share that role? Whose role is it to educate the consumer? Whose role is it to educate the students?

[Dr. Mary Buhr]

Legally it's obviously the province's role to educate the students. We in the university sector certainly take that responsibility very deeply. We also understand that we are a trusted source of knowledge transfer. All of our faculty are asked to do three things in their job descriptions: teach, do research, and do what we call “service.” A lot of that service is literally going out and working with people in these various industries. In our college we do that a lot. We're out on the ground.

Are we really educating consumers in the way you mean? I would say we're not good at that. We clearly need help with that. In these kinds of conversations, misunderstanding of the term “biotech” is exactly the same as misunderstanding the term “agriculture”. When you say “agriculture,” over 90% of the Canadian population see a farmer in overalls standing in the field with a pitchfork. They don't see GPS or banks. They don't see the high-tech research institutes.

It is this need for communication to the public about the matters that are the most important to them that we really have to get across. The food riots that we're seeing around the world are going to really bring that.... We have an opportunity and we need to take it, but we need to work together on that public communication.

[Bert Vandenberg]

I learned something very interesting at a meeting at the University of Wisconsin a couple of years ago. They were trying to teach the general public about vitamins and healthy eating back in the 1930s. They hired an artist and a writer at the college level to get that across to the public. You can see those paintings if you go there. They're very interesting. It was a communication exercise, and we don't take it seriously enough.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

Brad, you talked about reducing your cereal acreage at your farm. I've talked to some of the researchers, and there are concerns that we're not seeing any research on the cereal side of things, such as on wheat and barley.

How do we prevent some scenarios that are not healthy in the environment, where we see canola, canola, canola, or rotations being pushed because of the lack of profitability in the cereals? What would be your suggestion?

[Brad Hanmer]

It might take a ride in a pickup and a case of beer to really get down to the bottom of it, but I'm going to take a stab at it.

The genome is done. Are we going to use genetic engineering on wheat globally, yes or no? If the answer is no, you won't see the private industry come in for the reasons we've discussed and do the proprietary traits for profit. If we're going to have that as the scenario, public breeding is going to have to take hold in the cereal grains.

Publicly, some of the big guys have said that they're going to double corn yields, and they put that on the wall. Whether they can get there or not, I don't know, especially with aquifers drying up in the Midwest and all these things, but let's pretend they do. Where are Canadian farmers going to be globally, if they can't compete when corn yields double?

In Saskatchewan we will be relying more and more on pulses and oilseeds, Randy, to make profitability. We could have corn varieties that are bred for cold tolerance, which are coming. One hour north of Regina we're putting in 640 acres of a 2,050 heat unit Roundup Ready corn. We bought a corn header and a corn planter. That's going.

Agronomically, the best suited crops are cereals, as you know. I believe firmly that has to come from public funding, because you will not have that event in wheat. Maybe Bert wants to disagree or agree with that.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Does anyone want to comment?

[Mark Wartman]

I'll just note that we have done some exceptional research in barley over the last few years, and it continues.

There is cereals research going on in our institution. There's also research going on in terms of wheat midge tolerance in the wheat area, so it is happening. If I could pick up on what was being said, it's not happening at the levels that might produce much more effective cereal crops here, crops that would be much more competitive.

[Dr. Mary Buhr]

I would like to say a few words on wheat as well.

Certainly the major global corporations are betting on GM wheat. They are going to take over and own a lot of those. At the university we have released a new variety of durum wheat. We have released three new varieties of wheat over the last year from researchers at our university. We're clearly doing that kind of work, but it's not a profitable crop for the producers.

Part of what we have to do is get back into that profitability piece so that it really is an effectively used crop. Otherwise, if we don't continue to breed in the public sector and make it a profitable crop in the producer sector, our consumers are going to be paying whatever the major global corporations decide they need to be paying for GM wheat. That's what they're betting on.

If we're not doing the disease resistance and we're not doing the drought and wet tolerance and we're not growing a wheat crop for a specific end product use--durum wheat for pastas, or whatever--then it's going to be in the hands of the corporations. That's a decision that has to be made one way or the other, but it needs to be made thoughtfully. We must not just let it happen.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you very much to all of you for being here.

I think this morning is a good example of the kind of meeting we can have when we take out the sentimental, rhetorical, and political aspects and just sit down to facts. For me, it was very educational. I know a lot more about biotech and GMOs than I did earlier this morning.

Thank you very much to all of you. I'm looking forward to our visit this afternoon. I'm sure we'll see some of you, if not all of you. I'm not sure who is going to be there.

Thank you very much again. I found it very good.

To the committee members, I believe we're having lunch here. I'll remind you that at one o'clock sharp, the bus is leaving. We're not boarding it then; we're leaving then.

The meeting is adjourned.