Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'll start with Mary.
Mary, thank you. It's good to see you again. And thank you for your candour on your reference to the moral imperative to deal with food security and the environment. We're ignoring it. We have 10% of our population who are food insecure in Canada, living in poverty, and we just don't seem to be willing to do anything about it.
You also heard me reference earlier the government's own expert panel on federal support to research and development, which noted that we've consistently dropped our expenditure on research and development each year since 2006, to the point where we spend only 1% of our GDP on business expenditure on R and D, as opposed to the 1.6% that's spent on average by 34 other OECD countries.
And it gets worse. NSERC has dropped quality and novel by-products from its list of target areas for strategic grants, and the Network of Centres of Excellence, as you know, didn't renew its funding for the Advanced Food and Materials Network, otherwise known as AFMNet. I'm sure you know Rickey Yada, in Guelph.
It's disconcerting to me that this trend exists when we have to increase our food production by 70% over the next 40 years if we're going to feed the world.
So can you tell us, are we heading in the wrong direction? Should we be reversing our course? What do you think should be done to restore agriculture and agrifood as a priority for granting agencies?