Agriculture Committee on March 24th, 2011

[Alex Atamanenko, NDP, British Columbia Southern Interior, BC]

But surely it would not interfere with your industry, because you've already established your market foothold. Any new innovation, whether it's GM or non-GM, should not have any negative effect on farmers whom you represent, but it may have an effect on farmers in other aspects of the agriculture industry. Would it not be prudent to at least have a back-up so that we can ensure that they would have continued access to markets?

I don't quite understand why you have this position.

[Jim Everson]

Certainly any new GM trait that comes forward goes through a very rigorous process, so it's not automatic that a new GM trait coming would be introduced into the canola sector without any complication from a safety point of view; it has to go through a very rigorous process. The suggestion is that we add to that process beyond the health and safety considerations.

The other thing I would add is that the industry works very hard in a variety of different areas to support the regulatory process. We have a market access policy at the Canola Council that says that seed developers will not commercialize a new GM trait until they have approvals in all the major markets for the canola industry around the world. That's to protect against market disruption.

We have an export ready program, which is a very robust communications program to producers, that lists the GM traits that were commercialized in the past and are not commercialized anymore and that they should not be growing. It also provides the maximum residue levels that exist for countries we're shipping to, telling them not to exceed...or not to use these pesticides that are a problem in some of the countries we're exporting to.

So we have a lot in place to ensure that we're maintaining those markets and are addressing the regulatory standards of each of our major markets to ensure that we're compliant.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Mr. Atamanenko, you're actually out of time, but I was going to allow Mr. White to comment on this. It was indicated that he might.

[Alex Atamanenko, NDP, British Columbia Southern Interior, BC]

Or maybe we could hear something from Richard, if possible.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Yes. I will allow that.

[Richard Phillips]

Let me just go back a little bit in time to when Monsanto was going to bring in its Roundup Ready wheat. The farm group I was with at the time told Monsanto that it was a really bad idea, that it would cause too much market disruption. As a result of a lot of concerns raised in those marketplaces, it was withdrawn.

At the end of the day, they can't bring something forward if the farmers don't want to grow it, and the farmers are adamant that they don't want it.

When we talk about the uncertainty and you say you're going to do a market assessment, I guess we have to ask whether it's going to be real or whether it's just going to be the minister asking one of his senior staff people to do a quick survey and then sign off on it or whether it is Ag Canada doing it.

What if, in your marketplace, there's one country that says they don't want it? Is that enough to negate it or not? If it's a small country like Zambia that says they don't want GM wheat and the European Union says they do, does that stop it? There's a lot of uncertainty around what is actually meant.

This issue probably will come back again for further discussion. I think it needs to be thought through a lot more, because if we want people to invest in research, and if they can't be relatively sure how the process will work at the end of the day—what assessment actually means—then they're not going to invest here. They will take their resources and invest in Australian wheat breeding instead of Canadian wheat breeding.

That uncertainty is what chases people away, and that's what gives our farmers concern, because we want that innovation and those research dollars being spent here. It's quite uncertain to us exactly how all of this would have worked.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Okay. Now we'll move to Mr. Lemieux for seven minutes.

[Pierre Lemieux, Conservative, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

Was Mr. White going to comment? Was he forgotten there?

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Mr. White, did you want to comment on that?

[Richard White]

Maybe I'll just follow up very quickly.

We strongly believe that it is the role of the government to regulate regarding food, feed, and environmental safety. That's being done right now. It is up to the industry, because of the investment and the dollars they have invested—not only farmers, but the developers as well. When we're talking about these other criteria, those are decisions best left to the industry, to the investment community, and to farmers, because they are the ones who made the investment, and those are commercial and marketing decisions that need to be made. The government has done its role, the way it's done now. Please leave the industry to make the decision on the marketing and the roll-out, if appropriate. That's the rightful place to have those responsibilities and the decision-making going on.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you.

Mr. Lemieux.

[Pierre Lemieux, Conservative, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

Thank you very much, Chair.

Just to finish up on that theme, I think that's an excellent discussion. Mr. Atamanenko mentioned he had been told that the discussion shouldn't even have been had. I don't think that's a fair thing to say. I think the problem at the time was that there was a bill attached to the discussion. It wasn't that the discussion shouldn't have been had; it's that a bill could have passed and actually changed the laws in Canada, driving a solution, when there hadn't been sufficient discussion or collaboration with industry.

I think Mr. Everson and Mr. White made excellent points in that the government does have a role to play, but the industry has solutions. The industry has a role to play too. They don't necessarily want a bill hanging there like an axe, and I think that's the problem.

Mr. Atamanenko and I had some discussions about perhaps bringing the idea to committee before it got moved forward in a bill, to have the debate and to have the discussion—much like we're doing now as part of a biotechnology study—but without necessarily having the constraints of a bill.

I do want to pursue a really interesting point. Mr. Vandervalk, you were talking about savings to farmers. This is interesting because I think one of the strongest arguments for biotechnology is that our farmers need to remain competitive. They need to lower input costs, they need to increase yields, but we talk about those at a macro level. I'm wondering if you might be able to give us something a little more detailed in terms of what you think biotechnology offers to the average farm in terms of efficiencies, savings that make a farmer more competitive.

[Stephen Vandervalk]

Sure. Great question.

I guess what it comes down to, taking increased revenue aside as far as the cost savings, is that some of the savings as far as how much better our land is becoming is one side. But on actual dollars of saving two passes of tillage—less equipment, fewer human resources, less fuel—I was doing a quick number off the top of my head of between $10 and $20 an acre saving on two passes alone, and there's talk of 19 million acres of crop going in this year. So that's $200 million to $300 million just in that alone, never mind the environmental side.

If anybody's been down to Lethbridge, it blows. It's the windiest place in North America, and you cannot be tilling. You can't do it. Your land will blow away. So the savings there are incalculable.

I would say off the top of my head, as far as cutting the tillage out, we're between $10 and $20 an acre on that alone, and there would be some other savings as well.

[Pierre Lemieux, Conservative, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

And that definitely makes our farmers more competitive.

[Stephen Vandervalk]

Absolutely.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

I don't mean to interrupt, but Mr. White indicated that he would like the floor, if that's okay.

[Pierre Lemieux, Conservative, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

Mr. White.

[Richard White]

If I could add to that, Stephen is exactly right. Just a little more information on that: a study released by the University of Saskatchewan in 2010 reported that growers found a total economic benefit of $26 per acre with $15 per acre in carry-over benefits due to savings in weed control costs the year after growing canola—Stephen mentioned that with his pulses—as well as an $11 per acre direct benefit to their farm as well.

So there has been some research done recently that quantified that, and it verifies what Stephen is saying.

[Stephen Vandervalk]

Also, for managing your farm with less equipment, less manpower, it's a snowball effect. It permeates through the entire system of your farm management.

[Pierre Lemieux, Conservative, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

Those are great comments, and I think it's good for the committee to hear in concrete terms what the impact of biotechnology is on farmers. I think we all have the interest of farmers at heart, and we want to see them succeed. When we did our study on the economic challenges facing competitiveness of agriculture, these were things that we were looking at, and you've helped to add some meat to the bones.

On another question I have, I've been approached a number of times saying farmers use the government, and you're in the pocket of the seed companies and that type of thing, which isn't true. As I said, I think as a committee, as a government, we want to see farmers succeed, and we want to offer them the tools to succeed. Let farmers decide what tools they want to take advantage of and which ones they don't.

You made an interesting point, Mr. Phillips, about SeCan being owned by farmers, one of the largest seed providers, and you made some comments about research too.

I'd like to follow up on the comments you made about public research versus private sector, because people make the charge that this is all being governed by big private companies wanting to make lots of money. Can you comment on the public side, and the value of public research versus private research, to help put that myth to rest?

[Richard Phillips]

Public research is really key. There's just stuff that they put their teeth into where there's no.... I know the minister, through the cluster, has been trying to get research more focused into the exact needs, but you do need a little bit of that “pie in the sky” research, the “what if we did” types of things.

I'll give you one example where certainly the fertilizer companies would never fund the research. We met with an Agriculture Canada researcher here just before Christmas, and what he's looking at--and this has huge environmental benefits as well as economic benefits--is coating fertilizer, for example, with a special polymer so that there would not actually be any release of the fertilizer until such time as the root tip touched the fertilizer.

Randy, you farm, and Mr. Easter farms. Imagine that your fertilizer would not wash away, leach away, not do anything, would sit there dormant till the root tips touched it and then the polymer would open and make the fertilizer available to the roots. Likewise, they can have the polymer sensitive to too much moisture so it then closes up again and saves the fertilizer, which prevents leaching, prevents pollution. That's the sort of stuff that won't get funded in the private sector, unless somebody could really see they could make a lot of money from that quickly.

That core research goes so far in the public sector, and at a certain point it has to find a private sector partner to go with it. Those are the sorts of things that can happen, and farmers like public research. When you go out and talk to your average farmer, who does he go to for trusted advice? They'll go to Monsanto, they'll go to Bayer, they'll go to Syngenta, but they will also go to Agriculture Canada researchers, especially in the cereal grains. In Lethbridge, they like to go down there to the Agriculture Canada people and ask what's happening, where are things going. They're a neutral, trusted source, but there will never be enough money for Agriculture Canada to do everything themselves, so we have to find ways to encourage them to take things so far and then partner with the private sector, which brings a lot of money to the table and away they go.

Those are the models where we would see things shaking out.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Your time has expired.

We now move to Mr. Valeriote for five minutes.

[Frank Valeriote, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Thanks, gentlemen, for attending our hearings today.

You know, we've heard so much, and I don't disagree with the proposition that with climate change and having to feed the world, and increasing our production by 70% by 2050 to feed an extra three billion, it's a significant issue. I think most of us understand that biotechnology, and GMO specifically, is one tool that can be used to alleviate that pressure. At the same time, there's a broad spectrum of belief here on whether you go completely unregulated and let the market manage itself or eliminate GMOs altogether.

That's the spectrum. I would probably find myself somewhere in the middle.

Mr. White, you made a comment about the government being engaged in regulations to the extent that they have to ensure that the environment is protected, and I can only assume that within the preserving the environment investigation, one has to look at protecting biodiversity. For me, one of the big issues that has transcended most others in this discussion about GMOs is the threat to biodiversity, and the right basically of coexistence so that non-GMO and organic can actually flourish unthreatened, I suppose is the word, and so that GMO can flourish unthreatened, for that matter, by coexistence with organic or non-GM.

I'm just wondering, do any of you know whether, in that environmental assessment that is undertaken by Health Canada, the coexistence issue or the threat to biodiversity is examined? I ask that because in Mr. Easter's motion, he wants a moratorium on alfalfa. We want a moratorium on alfalfa so that we have the ability to ensure that the genetic integrity, production, and preservation of a diversity of genetically modified organisms, non-GMO, and organic production can be maintained.

Can any of you comment on that?

Mr. White, I know you mentioned it.

[Richard White]

I'm not aware of an actual diversity assessment, but diversity is not assessed on traditional breeding either. GM is no different, except there's a particular trait in there that was genetically modified. All the other genes in the plant are naturally progressing or recessing, whatever the case may be. There's a lot more to a canola plant than just the GM trait; it's all those other traits in there too. I would propose that there's as much diversity within a GM canola plant as there would be with a traditional one, with the exception of one gene.

There are many other genes in there other than that one. To answer your question, I don't believe this is under consideration in the safety and the environmental assessments, but again that's an area where farmers and the industry have learned to coexist. We have traditional growers out there now. There are not very many of them because the economics for GM production are substantially higher, but again there's still the opportunity for them to grow the system they are comfortable with and make the best money for them on their farm. That's a decision for the farmers to make.

[Frank Valeriote, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Before you do, would each of you address whether you acknowledge the right of other crops to coexist unthreatened by the commingling, we'll say, that threatens their biodiversity?

Go ahead, Stephen.