Thank you very much.
Good afternoon, committee members, and thank you for inviting me to appear before you today.
As you know, I'm a professor of food and agricultural economics at the University of Guelph. My research focus is on consumer demand for food and food products. I'm also on the management team of the consumer and market demand research network, one of the five agricultural policy networks established under the Growing Forward framework.
My comments today are my comments alone, but they are informed by my interactions with my colleagues both here at Guelph and at other institutions, as well as those involved in the consumer and market demand research networks.
To contextualize my comments today, I'd like to highlight some results coming from consumer research in my home department. In particular, a recent consumer survey undertaken by me and a number of my colleagues shows that three factors dominate what consumers feel is important when buying food: health and nutrition, safety of food, and taste. These three factors are followed closely by: cost, where food comes from, the availability of choice, ethical issues, the behaviour of food companies, and convenience.
The fact that we've identified health and nutrition, safety of food, and taste is not unique. Indeed, many other studies have found the same. These studies aren't limited just to Canada but are found in other countries in different parts of the world. Nonetheless, these studies all point to the importance of these aspects in shaping the purchase decisions by the food gatekeeper to the home and by the consumption decisions of many.
I'd like to focus on two of these aspects in my opening remarks, in particular, health and nutrition and food safety. This is not to suggest that the other factors are unimportant but that these two aspects speak squarely to the purpose of today's meeting.
The health and nutrition dimension is, in my mind, a bit of an awkward dimension to consider when discussing Canadian agricultural policy. I say that not because the health and nutrition dimension doesn't belong in the context of agricultural policy, but largely because our previous generations of agricultural policy have focused squarely, but not entirely, on stabilizing a variety of economic measures such as prices, gross margins, whole farm incomes, and trying to offset the effect of untoward climactic incidents on things like yield. The addition of health and, implicitly, nutrition may seem odd to some, but I do think it reflects the broader notion that agriculture gives us food, food provides nutrition and shapes our diet, and our diet, in conjunction with a number of other factors, shapes our health outcomes. As such, the connection between agriculture and health I think is immutable.
Moreover, the connection between agriculture, food, and health is one that has provided a motive for the development of Canada's functional food and natural health product sectors. These are food products or derivatives of agricultural commodities that have bioactive compounds that can serve to enhance the health of those who consume them. The functional food and natural health product sectors are responding to emerging markets that reflect, in my opinion, a population that wishes to maintain and enhance their quality of life through their choice of functional foods and natural health products.
In this respect, the challenge to providing those Canadians who wish to purchase such products is not about how the industry will respond, but with respect to the cohesion between agricultural policy and health and nutrition policy. Moreover, it has to do with whether these policies and their implementation are at odds with one another. The former—i.e. agricultural policy—is the purview of federal and provincial departments of agriculture. The latter, health and nutrition policy, is largely in the purview of Health Canada.
In this respect, I see a need for greater integration of the policy objectives across these different domains, but in a manner that ensures new food products and natural health products are both safe and effective and are also available to Canadians and non-Canadians—that is, people outside of Canada—who may wish to purchase these products.
With respect to food safety, I'd like to point out a couple of facts from some of Agriculture Canada's own research. Agriculture Canada has undertaken a number of surveys related to gauging consumer reaction to food safety and quality in Canada as well as to functional foods and natural health products.
One survey in particular has been quite important and has been repeated over time, and that's Agriculture Canada's food safety and quality tracking study. The most recent study, Wave 3, which was undertaken in 2010, indicates that the lion's share of Canadians are confident that food in Canada is safe. In particular, over 50% of surveyed Canadians reported that they were completely confident or very confident in the safety of Canada's food. A further 35% said they were somewhat confident.
I am of the opinion that such confidence stems from an expectation held by the broad citizenry that food safety control systems managed by both the public and the private sector are effective. As an example of this, I'd like to remind the committee of the speed with which industry and various federal and provincial departments acted when BSE-infected cattle were discovered in Canada in May of 2003.
I would also like to point out that we agricultural economists actually saw an increase in demand for beef—that is, beef consumption—after the BSE event, an outcome that some, including myself, have attributed not just to economic forces, but also to consumer confidence in light of how the crisis was managed.
A further example, I think, is the listeria crisis that happened in 2008. The speed with which the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and Maple Leaf Foods reacted, and the public relations campaign that came about from that, had a positive effect in terms of how quickly Canadians readjusted their consumption back to their base levels prior to the listeria recall.
I have a couple of other points I would like to add.
I agree wholeheartedly with Dr. Fraser's comment on ethnocultural foods. We're a country that's largely made up of immigrants. Increasingly, we're relying on immigrants coming to Canada as a way of populating our country. And what is interesting from a consumer point of view is something that we call “aculturization”, in particular, food aculturization.
When new Canadians come to Canada they bring their cuisines with them. We then adopt those cuisines and make them our own in different ways, shapes, and forms. At the same time, many new Canadians, not necessarily those who have newly immigrated, but the first-generation Canadians, then adopt a Canadian diet.
I think that “aculturization” speaks to the importance of the growing need to recognize the diversity of the population, both in terms of where people originate from, ethnically, but also the diversity of their own diets.
Lastly, I'd like to point out something that I think is very important with respect to consumers, and that has to do with what I've called in the past the fragmentation of the consumer landscape. It used to be that number 2 yellow corn was number 2 yellow corn, and anyone could grow number 2 yellow corn and sell number 2 yellow corn. Now we actually are looking for a type of corn that has certain characteristics and traits that are unique to particular lines and varieties. The reason we're looking for those particular traits and characteristics has to do with the fact that there is a consumer or a customer who has a very specific and targeted need, and that product is designed to fill that need.
We've moved from a commodity world to a product world, and those product worlds are very difficult to navigate because we don't deal with a single consumer demographic; we deal with a near-infinity of consumer demographics where each consumer household could be viewed as having unique tastes and preferences. That makes it very difficult for the food industry to respond to those growing demands, but it also presents some important opportunities the Canadian agricultural sector could be poised to act on with enhanced programs such as Growing Forward 2.
Thank you very much.