That's a great question. Thank you for asking it.
It's a question that's complex to answer because genetically modified organisms have the potential to have such a huge impact. It touches on all different aspects of life in Canada.
We're looking at the farming system as a whole. We're looking at biodiversity, ecological diversity, scales of farming, economic impact, intellectual property. Off the top of my head, to address this, it's a big, challenging question.
I think what you're doing here helps to get at that. You have to pick it apart in reference to sustainability. In order to answer this question properly, you have to make sure that you're thinking about the economic dimensions as well as the environmental implications of biodiversity and the effects we're having on things like the suite of seeds that farmers have access to.
What seems to be happening now is that genetically engineered traits are getting stacked on top of other seeds. Those seeds are becoming owned by corporations. In days gone by, our government did a lot of research into agriculture and created varieties that were publicly available to our farmers. That's not the case so much anymore.
When I did my Master's research, I looked at the availability of soybean seeds to farmers. In the 1970s, soybean seeds were 90% held by public research facilities in Canada. They had been developed by researchers here in Ottawa. By the 1990s, the case was completely reversed, with 90% of the seeds owned by private interests.
I think we need to go back to a situation where we have more publicly developed seeds. Those seeds should be developed with the needs of our farmers and our food system as the top priority. That's where we need to be headed with this conversation. We need to be privileging those things.
It's important to foster innovation. It's important to foster biotechnology and all of those different technologies, but we need to be doing it in a way that serves all Canadians' needs and not just the narrow needs of agricultural biotechnology companies. I think that right now it's going to be difficult to tease those things apart.
With respect to the comment that was made about the amount of funding in the last five years to organic agriculture and the innovation centre, that's a total of $7 million, if I recall correctly. But compared with the amount of money that the Canadian government has put into agricultural research and biotechnology, there is no comparison. That number pales in comparison. It's apples and oranges, the case you're making.