That's a big, big question, but thank you, because it's an important one.
The government, during the campaign, had as part of its platform a national farm and food strategy, so that's become one of the minister's priorities. We are, as a department, very involved with the Canadian Federation of Agriculture process, which has been one of engagement and discussion for about a year in order to come up with the framework of a strategy.
We've also been a partner with the Conference Board of Canada, which is doing the same kind of thing with a number of what they call investors doing some basic foundational research on what the elements of a food policy would be.
The department has established an interdepartmental committee of deputy ministers that involves my deputy, whom many of you have met, as the chair. It engages CFIA as one of our portfolio partners and involves the health portfolio, so Health Canada and PHAC. We've also reached out to DFAIT and CIDA, because there are food security issues involved with developing a food policy.
So there's a concentration of bureaucratic effort at this point to do a few things, one of which is to put a framework around what food policy really means. The very first thing that everybody agrees on is the clear nexus between food and health. A lot of what was driving food policy at the very beginning was the connection to health budgets, primarily in provinces. If you can use healthy eating strategies to reduce chronic disease--diabetes, heart disease, cardiovascular problems--then you're further ahead than trying to treat those diseases. That kind of laid the groundwork for greater interest in a food policy.
You have a concentration of deputies looking at these kinds of issues and trying to decide where the best value lies in our efforts. The merging dimensions of a food policy that we see others coming up with include this food-health nexus, as well as the whole local eating movement, the movement towards greater attention to the carbon footprint of your food. A great deal more attention is being made to how we deal with food security problems, which have become much more prominent on the international stage recently because of food price spikes and volatility. So our first job, I think, is to put a frame around it and then get some policy direction from the government about where we go with the food policy.
The short answer to your question, Mr. Atamanenko, is yes, it is on the agenda, and we're looking very seriously at it.