Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.
I think we come at this from a university perspective, which covers a wide range of activities, and we have a number of things we wish to talk about that are broader rather than specific.
One of the first things that actually concerns us, as a university, is the ability to address public perceptions about agriculture. Having technological innovations that you can't use because they're resisted by society is worse than not having them at all. Surveys have identified that the majority of North American consumers, for example, make purchase decisions on the basis of taste, affordability, and nutrition. But has their perception about agriculture been too susceptible to adverse messaging from various minority fringe elements? This, we believe, is something that AAFC, together with universities and other third-party entities, can play a role in by entering a dialogue with the Canadian public regarding Canada's role and capacity to address global nutritional securities. I think without that, a lot of the innovations we see as coming forward and helping Canadian agriculture to adapt to an uncertain future will be difficult to implement.
Let me give just one example. We are told all the time that the climate is changing, and it may well be. If the climate is changing, we cannot be certain precisely how, anywhere across Canada, that will affect the local weather. We would need a strategy to ensure that crops can still be grown by developing crops that are resistant to salt, resistant to drought, resistant to heat, resistant to wet, and resistant to cold. We can cover any eventuality, but if we end up with a public perception that genetically modified crops are not to be eaten, then the technologies we develop in order to adapt and implement them will not be usable. This is something that has happened, of course, within the European sphere.
We also need to find ways of overcoming...and having better collaboration among universities themselves, AAFC, provincial organizations, and the industry. Dealing, as we do at the moment, principally within provinces, because of the way in which the funding arrives across Canada, is not necessarily particularly helpful when you're dealing with one contiguous geographical region like the Prairies. So we need some way of generating memorandums of understanding between all the players within one geographical region as to what should be developed. Without this, we will not be developing the sensible innovations that we would be able to pass on to the agricultural industry, which have to be developed in association with them.
I'll give you one example. In Brandon, Manitoba, we have a beef herd. Collaboration in research and development would have been much higher in the past years were it not so hard to get agreements in place to access Agriculture Canada's facilities or animals.
Another very concrete example is that it's extremely difficult to hook a university tractor to an AESB trailer, for insurance reasons. So we need some innovations, not just in the science but in the way in which we presently do things.
Agriculture is a complex industry. It impacts society, it impacts the economy, and it impacts environmental health. Complex issues need complex solutions, and those complex solutions come about by having multidisciplinary approaches across institutions, sustained and supported in the long term and not just in the short term. We see value in these models to address the issues facing agriculture, and we believe greater support is required if those multi-disciplinary innovations are going to be achieved in terms of the coordination of those projects and activities.
A specific issue to be tackled in this area might therefore be a stronger requirement in Growing Forward 2 for interprovincial collaboration.
I will now pass on the rest of this statement to my colleague, Dr. Wittenberg, to talk specifically about the activities we are engaged in, which we believe are important, in terms of innovation, for the future of Canadian agriculture.