Thank you, Mr. Chair, and I want to thank the committee for inviting me to present to you.
I also want to just briefly mention my background because it has a significant effect on the sort of research that we do. My first job was at Ciba-Geigy in North Carolina. It's now part of Syngenta. I then came to the University of Guelph as a faculty member. I had an industrial research chair that was partly funded by Pioneer Hi-Bred. Then I left the university and went to work at Pioneer itself in Iowa where I was research director for agronomic trades. Then I came back after they were bought by Dupont. I came back to the university as a faculty member again.
Since 2003 we've had an ongoing substantial collaboration with Syngenta that's going for at least another few years, probably longer. I want to point out that this is very rare to have this type of long-term collaboration with an industrial partner. The longevity is due to a combination of factors that I want to get to later.
Obviously we'd like to think it's partly due to our competence, but it also has to do with the availability of infrastructure as well as other aspects of funding that gives us flexibility in research that I'll get to in a minute.
The two questions I was asked to address were, does the industry need government help to finance biotechnology research, development, and commercializations, and how can government help? Obviously, I only have about seven or eight more minutes, so I'll only address these from my field, which is field crop genetics and biotechnology.
I want to give a two-minute spiel about the history of research and development in this area. Industrial research organizations really only have a very large effort focused on only one crop, which is corn, for various historical and commercial reasons. Even here, they can only do a fraction of the possible research, which does open up the possibility of public sector researchers helping do some of this.
The Canadian public sector research has had very significant contributions in all areas of crop breeding and genetics. Over the last period of time it is getting more difficult to do product development. The technologies for crop genetic improvement have grown more complex and costly. At the same time, I would argue that in the public sector there's been a slow diminution of the public efforts as well as a dilution of R and D into a variety of different areas not related to food production. I can get into that if you have more questions later.
What I do want to spend a bit of time on is looking forward. I do think there are enormous opportunities to be internationally competitive in this area. I just want to highlight some of the strengths and some of the weaknesses we need to solve if we're going to do this.
What are the strengths? Generally we have good infrastructure, for the most part. A lot of that was funded by CFI and other programs that were funded by the federal government. We have good intellectual capabilities. I'd like to say that.
One of the really important things for me has been good funding of matching grants stimulating company-university interactions. This is reasonably unique to Canada when you look at the international scene. What I mean by that is if you get money from a company, then you can get matching funds either from NSERC, our national granting agency, or there are Ontario programs for us here as well.
Why is that important? Obviously it's twofold. One, the company gets a bigger bang for the buck, so it's more interested in doing that. For the individual researcher, it allows you to want to do this, because when you get company money.... I get a lot of money from Syngenta, but I use that to fund technicians to do certain things that have to do with the contract we have. What you can use the matching funds for is to hire post-docs and graduate students and do all the intellectually interesting things that go with that. So that's a really positive strength.
What are the weaknesses? I don't want to harp on this too much, but it's very clear that there's very poor funding of basic research in this area, and when you do international comparisons, that's utterly clear. That does have consequences, but I don't want to spend a lot of time on that.
What I do want to spend a bit more time on is the fact that there is no systematic, sustained, large-scale funding for required capabilities in this area. I think this is really, really important. I'm going to give you a couple of examples in other countries to just describe what I mean by this.
The first example is in Australia. Over the last three years they have funded three different facilities--each costing between $20 million and $30 million--to do something very close to my heart, which is to look at the effect of different crop genetics on different important traits, whether they be drought tolerance, yield, etc. One of the people I trained just left to run one of these facilities, so I know quite a bit about this.
We don't have anything in comparison in this country. I should also say that they not only fund the facility, but they fund the running of the facility in a sustained fashion, which we sometimes fail to do.
The second country...I know China was mentioned a couple of times. We started to develop substantial collaborations with people in China. They have put an enormous amount of money into looking at the genetics of their four most important crops: corn, wheat, rice, and soybeans. Now some of their research capabilities, I would say, are not up to our par, per person, but they're getting better and better all the time, and they'll be a very significant competitor--although my last point is that we can also use them as a collaborator.
And that's my final point. This sort of work is not done in one place, and we tend to have very poor funding for international collaboration. An example I'll give here is again with China. My colleague who works with me, Dr. Yong-Mei Bi, and I went to China a few times and we developed potentially a very large collaboration between the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the University of Guelph. The odd thing is, they're the developing country and they have lots of money to send people over. They're going to send a bunch of graduate students to work here. We have a very difficult time finding the funds to send students the other way, as well as staff and faculty. In a certain sense, it's a bit embarrassing.
The final point I want to make is, in my interactions with both Syngenta and people from other companies, it's very clear that the industry is looking for others for help doing much of the early stage research and development work. I'm absolutely convinced that those companies that develop this role will reap a disproportionate percentage of the benefits, both for their farm sectors as well as in the development of commercial opportunities.
Thank you very much.