Canada has the ability. One of the things that was stated carefully and clearly at the conference I was at was that we could readily increase productivity and efficiency of production to meet food needs. Whether or not the food can be efficiently distributed and whether or not we can make all the differences we need to make, we still don't know for certain.
Different crops and products are at different levels of efficiency now. For instance, when we look at GMO crops that are resistant to herbicides or pesticides, we see that we can produce more crop in the same amount of land with less pesticide and herbicide because of those genetics. So these things are all very intertwined.
The other thing we should be focusing on, something that I think we at AAFC and the rest of the research community can work on together, is decreasing waste. There's about 30%, best estimate, of foodstuffs that are wasted, whether it's through losses in harvest, losses during storage, or losses during processing. If we can reduce that loss due to wastage, we will increase automatically the amount of foodstuffs that are available. So we're increasing our efficiency by doing nothing other than harvesting, storing, and processing foods more efficiently. These are some of the things that, if we focus on them, can have a significant effect.
The other efficiency that we have to be careful of when we're dealing with any of these things has to do with food safety. When we're storing food, we're not just storing it and keeping it; it has to keep its nutritional quality, and it has to be safe and healthy. It's a multi-faceted problem. The best minds say we can do it if that's our purpose.