We have eliminated 10 million metric tonnes in greenhouse gas emissions through fuel savings, and we have saved $1.8 million in diesel fuel from reduced tillage and plowing.
Here's another fact that talks a little bit about the balance and who the winners are in biotechnology: $44 million represents the increase in net income for farmers who are involved in using biotechnology solutions.
Those are some of the facts about the benefits that have been generated in 13 years of what they call “GM technology”. But let's talk about the bigger picture--namely, what are the challenges we're facing internationally?
Today 10% of the available land on the planet is arable--permanent crop land. We have to produce much more food for a growing population with a minimal amount and reduce our environmental footprint. An update from FAO suggests that we will need to increase by 70% our food supply by 2050. Other estimates and studies have indicated a doubling of our current food supply. From this, 20% is expected to come from unused land. Developing countries will increase their import of cereals by 157% by 2030, and oilseed contribution to world calorie consumption will increase by 125% by 2030.
This is the context in which we're operating, and these are the challenges we face as a globe. I say that these challenges represent a huge opportunity for Canada because of our agricultural infrastructure, our land capacity, and our excellent farmers here in Canada.
Let me talk a little bit about the National Research Council. The National Research Council's role in Canadian agriculture has been a unique one, and our focus has been on technology. We do not have plant breeders, but we've supported the work of plant breeders. Perhaps one of our biggest contributions to the Canadian economy was as a co-developer of canola, which over the last two to three years has been estimated as a $14 billion to $16 billion industry in Canada. We've played a significant role in that. Almost every variety of canola that was GM has utilized some of our technology over the last 15 years. That was a major contribution to canola.
GM technology is not the only approach we're taking. We're looking at working with the pulse industry and developing genomics resources for them. They are non-GM. Their marketplace does not accept GM, and their approach is non-GM, so we're using and applying our technologies to help improve the productivity, improve the yield, and improve the healthiness of their products without a GM approach. We're doing the same thing in wheat and we're doing the same thing in flax.
The National Research Council itself, at the Plant Biotechnology Institute where I work, has two major programs. One is crop improvement and the other is value-added products from agriculture and from plants.
In the crop genomics, it involves crop production improvement. Again, the priorities, the type of technology, and the approaches are driven by market needs and requirements. In canola there are GM approaches that we're taking, and we're also pursuing non-GM approaches in canola. In wheat and flax and pulses, as I said earlier, it's a non-GM approach.
On the other side of our enterprise, where we're working on value-added products from plants, one of the areas we're looking at is co-products from flax. There are many interesting components of flax. I mentioned earlier some work I had done on isolating flax protein, which has an incredible property and value every bit as good as soy protein.
We also have been involved in developing products that have been used in malaria vaccines and other types of product that would be used for vaccine adjuvants that are produced from plants, with non-GM approaches to those as well.
That gives you a little bit of context in terms of what we do. All of those programs are supported by a number of technologies and capabilities that NRC has invested in and developed over the last 15 to 20 years.
Our relationship with Agriculture Canada is a close one, and it's growing closer year by year. We have major collaborations in many areas of Canada. In Saskatoon there's a very close working relationship between Agriculture Canada and the NRC.
Of course, you were in Prince Edward Island, and you saw the facility, which is an NRC-Ag Canada facility. That's another good example of how the two federal labs and organizations are working on their strengths.
As the science director from Ag Canada in Saskatoon said, Ag Canada is linked to producers, NRC is linked to industry and technology, and together they cover the value chain. We find that this relationship and this partnership is only growing.
Let me talk a little about some of the specific technologies. In the presentation you'll see that we give a technical definition of some of these technologies, but more important, we talk about how that technology can be used. For example, one of the core technologies is genomics and DNA sequencing. Those are the basic building blocks of every plant and every biological organism. Generating genetic resources--understanding all of the genes and the roles they play--is an incredible part of building better plants and better crops, whether it's yield improvement, drought resistance, or nutrient efficiency. This data is the building block for that.
We have what we call next-generation sequencing capability at NRC, which has developed resources for over 30 different crops that are grown in Canada.
Molecular markers are very interesting tools that build on this genomics capability. Just to give you a quick idea, what we do is identify genes or gene sequences that are associated with a specific trait in a plant. When the plant breeder is trying to identify a particular plant with a specific trait, whether it's drought tolerance or increased yield, he can identify that plant through DNA earlier on without having to grow the whole plant out. As a result, you can reduce your product development time by 30% to 50%.
For those of you who've been involved in business, reducing product development time by 30% to 50% is huge in terms of cost, time to market, and all those other factors related to a viable business and a viable crop. We are working with the pulse industry, the wheat industry, the canola industry, and the flax industry to develop these markers so that breeders can accelerate their time for developing new varieties.
There are a lot of non-GM technologies out there. I'll just quickly refer to them. One is called TILLING mutagenesis, which is a process used to generate mutations that can then be selected for unique traits that would otherwise take an infinite amount of time to find in nature.
There's also an interesting technology called plant phenomics, or phenotyping. The value of any crop is in the actual phenotype. It means that the physical product at the end has the properties or the qualities you're looking for. There's an interesting technology Australia has embraced. They've developed a $50 million facility to help breeders evaluate their traits.
The last comment I'll make, then, is on the opportunities in wheat. If you talk to farmers across Canada, you'll know that wheat is really under a lot of pressure. It's the weak link in the crop rotation. The profitability of wheat has been challenged over the last number of years. So one area we are focusing on with our partners is developing and improving the profitability, the yield, and the quality of wheat varieties across Canada.
We're working with Ag Canada, the universities, and the producer groups in variety development across Canada. In terms of Canada's competitiveness in wheat, of the five top exporters of wheat, Canada's productivity gains are the lowest. We have had a less than 1% productivity gain per year over a 50-year period. France is first at over 2%. Canada is 0.87%. Australia is fourth, at 0.92%, and that is in spite of 10 years of severe drought in Australia. So Canada's competitiveness is being challenged in wheat.
We're working hard with our partners to turn that around and make wheat a profitable crop in a farmer's rotation. Our objective is to provide a variety of products so that farmers have a choice of many varieties in their rotation that will all be profitable. Developing one crop and having only one profitable crop in your rotation is not a sustainable venture. We see what's happening. Because canola is the one crop farmers have been making money from, what they've been doing is overgrowing canola, and we're starting to see some issues with disease in canola. We have to turn that around by giving farmers other options to choose in their rotation that are just as profitable as canola.