I'm not an expert on alfalfa, but let me offer two thoughts on your basic question.
The first one was about evidence around the effect of different technologies on different producers. I have shared with your clerk, and I'll make available to the committee if it wishes, more comments that I didn't speak to today. They deal with studies done in Canada by my research team, studies asking questions about the economic effect, the agronomic effect, the use-of-chemicals effect, and the environmental effect of the chemicals that were used. Many of these industries, if they're not organic and are just conventional producers, use chemicals no matter what seed is used. It's just a question of which chemical is being used. Some of the chemicals have a lighter environmental footprint--not a zero footprint, but a lighter environmental footprint than others.
The second question goes to buffers. It's a really good question: what's the appropriate buffer? It's not clear. At the moment we use buffers for health and safety reasons. We have buffers built into our systems. We have them built into the contract registration system that's used. If you're producing high uric acid rapeseed, which produces a chemical that is deemed to not be safe in the international food system, we have a contract system that imposes buffers and controls. We use it for very explicit purposes. The other place we've used buffers is in the area of Bt corn, where we've tried to avoid the introgression of this and create at least a base population that's not resistant to the Bt gene in the plants.
Those both had very direct purposes. We have never used buffers for commercial purposes. We've always said that it's up to the industry to decide how to do buffers. It's not just organic and GM that would be interested in buffers; we have 90 or more differentiations of wheat alone, and every one of them has a potential of some cross-contamination. Similarly, in the canola world there are 300 or 400 varieties, many of which are differentiable. Each of them wants to sustain a prime quality.
If you open up the notion of buffers for economic reasons that are defined by regulation, you risk the possibility that you'll create a system in which no new variety that has a differentiable trait can enter the market. That's my big fear--that with the best of intentions, you achieve the worst of outcomes.