Let me make a couple of quick observations. I was the co-chair of the GM review of the regulatory food system for CBAC from 2001 to 2004, and I was on CBAC from the beginning to the end, so I have some experience with how that worked.
You have asked two questions that I don't think one mechanism can solve. There's a broad public policy question about acceptance or not of multiple technologies within the same system. That's a broad public policy question, and CBAC, quite frankly, wasn't able to deal with it. I'm not sure that any third-party institution can do that. I think that's something committees like yours can do. They can bring out the views and try to bring them together, because at the end of the day, it's not about what I or Mr. Zettel believe. It has to be an amalgam of those two views. That's the first point.
The second point is that you've asked very specific questions about low-level presence, adventitious presence, and how the system actually works. Yes, I think there's a lot more that can be done. In fact, over the last five or 10 years, various bureaucrats in your federal administration have been working very hard to develop rules and mechanisms so that we can have practical coexistence. We may not have that big of a public policy debate, which is yet to be held, but at the operational level, producers could be certain that when they plant a certain crop, the right mechanisms are in place to ensure the quality the end consumer wants.
That kind of debate is actually going to take place in Canada later this year. There's been an event called a coexistence conference that has been operating around the world. It started in Europe, where most of the focus was on having that high-level discussion. Do we want GM, and how do we keep it out of a system that is currently GM-free? It went to Australia two years ago, and the discussion ended up being about being halfway pregnant--we've introduced a few GM crops, but not all of them, and we're not sure where to go from here.
It's coming to Vancouver at the end of this year, and we're not going to have that high-level discussion; we're going to have that very practical discussion about how it is that in various parts of North America and in other parts of the world you can actually have organic, conventional, and industrial crops operating within the same agro-economic system. I think it's at the operational level that you can devolve authorities. In fact, most of those things come out of standard-setting bodies anyway, or through commodity groups getting together and sorting them out. I'm not sure that you can devolve that high-level debate beyond the political realm. At the end of the day, CBAC was told by 270 NGOs that they were not the venue for holding that discussion.