Agriculture Committee on Oct. 20th, 2011

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

We're going to call the meeting to order.

For our first hour, our witnesses are with us by video link. With us we have, from the British Columbia Fruit Growers' Association, Mr. Joe Sardinha and Mr. Glen Lucas; and from Winnipeg, Manitoba, at the University of Manitoba, we have Dr. Michael Trevan, Dean, and Dr. Karin Wittenberg.

Thank you very much to all of you for being here.

I guess you've been versed on what our topic of discussion is today, and I would ask that you stick to that.

I look forward to your testimony.

Mr. Sardinha or Mr. Lucas, which one of you is going to lead off? Either way, you have a total of ten minutes between you.

Go ahead, please.

[Joe Sardinha, President, British Columbia Fruit Growers' Association]

This is Joe Sardinha here, president of the B.C. Fruit Growers' Association.

Mr. Lucas is not with me, so I will be presenting alone.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Okay. Go ahead, Mr. Sardinha.

[Joe Sardinha]

Thank you very much for this opportunity. Through the miracle of modern technology we're able to participate in these consultations, something I would like to do in person, but unfortunately I'm still harvesting my apple crop here in B.C. It's a little bit late this year, so that has kept me at the farm.

In terms of science and innovation, I believe the right mix of investment in research will lead to innovation at the farm level, resulting in a more competitive and, more importantly, a profitable farm sector. We need to get it right. We also anticipate that the risk management tools we have today and are developing for the future would experience a decline in demand if we do get that basic research flowing correctly throughout the industry.

Research is a vital part of agriculture's unbroken record of improvement in quality and productivity. It is particularly important to Canada as a nation of exports with vast agricultural capacity. Canada has a stake in advancing farm productivity, with research as a key component.

Food security may not be an issue in Canada but it is an issue as food supplies tighten. In Canada we're looking more at the issue of rising food prices than food shortages. Comparing this to the Canadian agricultural sector, where the road of productivity is allowed to slide compared to other competing jurisdictions, we know that other world areas have higher yields than Canada, and we have to continue on the research and innovation front to maintain our competitiveness in that regard.

The value of inventions that are created in Canada can alone compensate for the investment in productivity enhancement. This is particularly important to the tree fruit industry in terms of variety development or the plant breeding programs we currently have. It's key to the innovation in the tree fruit sector.

I want to address a question that we developed here. It states, what are the interests of agricultural producers, especially tree fruit growers in research? Growers are most keenly interested in improvements to horticultural practices, for example, more efficient irrigation, more efficient pruning/thinning, picking, grading, and storage of produce, using automation and computer technology. As I've said, the development of new varieties that are suited to our northern climate is extremely important, as is more environmentally friendly pest control, which builds on successes of integrated and area-wide pest management, enabling producers to manage both current and emerging pest and disease issues. We are an importing nation and seem to be landing new insect and disease species on our shores on an ongoing basis.

What is the reality? We've seen with Growing Forward 1 that the delivery of research programs to high-value Canadian horticulture needs to be upgraded so that we are competitive and build value for Canadians.

The switch that established national research science clusters was well intentioned but poorly implemented. It took longer that expected to launch and the criteria and eligibility of research projects changed up to the final moment.

The Canadian Horticulture Council assumed the role of administrator of the edible horticultural science cluster and has done a commendable job in dealing with the many changes to the science initiative since its inception. Under the CHC's guidance, the Canadian apple industry, a very big part of which I am in, invested substantial effort in synthesizing provincial research priorities into national research priorities. The industry then worked to develop its top three project proposals, as did other commodity representatives of the CHC. Application deadlines were met, but the guidelines changed after the fact, and two of the industry's three proposals were turned down because they involved federal research employees at AAFC research centres—some of the criteria that was not spelled out from the outset of the industry developing its research priorities.

The process really undermines the industry's confidence in investing all this time and effort when projects are rejected for what we feel are new and inconsequential reasons.

Following that debacle, the CHC was informed just this past summer that additional unallocated funding existed for the horticultural science cluster. It was a last-minute scramble by all to submit new project proposals in a very short timeframe to take advantage of this additional funding that no one knew anything about prior to the government's announcement. The apple industry did submit for a new project, but this was done in a very ad hoc way and it didn't really follow the priority-setting process that we had used in identifying our previous three projects.

So was it the right project for our scarce resources? Perhaps not, but it certainly exposed some inadequacies in the funding process, and certainly all the changes we've been hit with in the cluster initiative have led to much confusion.

If agricultural associations are willing to commit their share of research investment, it's perhaps time that government programs are made more transparent at the outset, and certainly the science cluster initiative could have used more transparency and better program development because we saw far too many changes throughout the implementation of the program. We need less bureaucracy so as not to sideswipe industry’s efforts to capitalize on research that I believe will ultimately enhance the competitiveness and profitability of the agricultural sector.

We do have some Growing Forward 2 recommendations that we'd like to propose to your committee. The government has increased other types of agriculture and processing research at the expense of horticultural practices, often referred to as primary production research. We recommend ensuring the level of funding for research and horticultural practices be balanced with other research needs.

The government has let key research positions go unfilled when retirements occur or are imminent. In a round of consultations a few years ago, this was a high priority to resolve, yet no strategy is emerging, and the erosion of our science capacity continues.

For tree fruit, we recommend that a weed scientist, a post-harvest physiologist, and a plant breeder be hired to replace recently retired or soon to be retired scientists at the Pacific Agri-Food Research Centre in Summerland.

We recommend that advisory committees for research stations, composed of producers nominated by provincial commodity associations, be re-established, with meaningful input into business plans, including succession planning for researchers and adequate and balanced resources required for senior researchers and technical staff to ensure a balance between horticultural and other types of research.

Lastly, we recommend that the federal government provide incentives for consolidation of research. We believe that research can take on a more focused approach throughout research stations across Canada. We recommend that Agriculture Canada's research branch take strong measures to re-establish consolidation of research activities, such that we may not have a model where we're doing horticultural research at every station across Canada, but we will have what I believe will be centres of excellence for applied research that will deal with horticultural issues, grain, grains and oilseeds issues, and animal and livestock issues--so it is more targeted, much more efficient, and we can have the appropriate expertise placed at those positions.

I would like to thank you for this opportunity to present. I did want to speed it up, so if there are any questions, I would be more than willing to answer them.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you very much.

I'll now move to Dr. Trevan and Dr. Wittenberg, for minutes or less, please.

[Dr. Michael Trevan, Dean, University of Manitoba]

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.

[Dr. Karin Wittenberg, Associate Dean, Research, Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences, University of Manitoba]

Thank you.

At the University of Manitoba we have strategically invested in six key areas of research and development. And I think there is an opportunity for alignment of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada activities in Manitoba on several fronts, to be able to develop national leadership in student training, research, technology transfer, commercialization, and outreach. That is not to say that both parties need to be engaged in all activities, but combined they can support this continuum.

These areas also would be expected to contribute to the provincial or regional, or in some cases national, risk management strategies that might be associated with the changing environment in which our producers and processors are operating, whether we're talking about changing markets, changing societal expectations, or, again, weather patterns.

The areas in Manitoba where we have significant investment include the area of livestock and the environment, where Manitoba is leading in areas such as greenhouse gas, nutrient management, food safety, and water management for integrated livestock crop production systems. There is also good strength here in the area of functional foods and nutraceuticals, in crop and plant health, in development in the area of entomology, which we see as very important if we look at changes in how our environment will be behaving, how climate and weather will be behaving in the future, and, finally, in the development of a sustainable by-products sector.

The fifth area is related to something that we are seeing on this campus and several other campuses across Canada. Increasingly, universities are entering into a dialogue with remote and aboriginal communities. This serves as a unique opportunity for Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada to link with such entities as Aboriginal Affairs, or the appropriate provincial department, and our agriculture-based universities, to enter into a dialogue towards a nutritional security or, if you will, a nutrition for health strategy in Canada's remote and aboriginal communities.

These would be the recommendations that we'd like to bring forward to the committee.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you very much. I appreciate your both staying under the time.

We now move to questioning.

Mr. Atamanenko, five minutes.

[Alex Atamanenko, NDP, British Columbia Southern Interior, BC]

Thank you very much, Chair.

Thank you to all of you for being here.

Good to see you again, Joe.

I'll try to divide my questions in half. Maybe I'll start, Joe, with you. You talked about the fact that on some of these programs the concept is good but the implementation needs working on. In your recommendations you touched upon the research positions. As you know, I've been in contact with Greg Norton from the cherry growers about Summerland, and his concern was that scientists, those who have helped the industry in the past, aren't being replaced.

Could you zero in specifically and give us a few hard points and recommendations, specifically in regard to Summerland, before I move on to the other witnesses?

[Joe Sardinha]

Thank you, Alex.

First of all, to go back to the science cluster initiative, I think it was a fantastic idea that was really allowing industry to lead things--developing and identifying priorities, developing project proposals, and then tapping into 75% government funding. That was a fantastic initiative. But in the end, because it was so new to everyone, the whole program wasn't figured out and the goalposts kept changing. This was frustrating for industry. We didn't know where we were from one day to the next. Fortunately, as time has gone along, we have projects under way, and we're capitalizing on the federal government's generous funding.

As for the Summerland research station, we've had gaps. We haven't had a research pathologist for two or three years now, ever since Dr. Peter Sholberg retired. We had Dr. Frank Kappel with the cherry-breeding program. He's had a fantastic track record. He's just retired. So now we don't have a cherry breeder in Summerland. I'll remind this committee that Summerland is world-renowned for cherry breeding. Some 80% of the new cherry varieties worldwide have been developed at Summerland. So there's been some real prestige for the Canadian plant breeding program right here in Summerland as a result of that individual.

Now we have one plant breeder. Her specialty is apples. We'd like to have someone come in and work on cherries, because of the proven track record.

And there are other retirements that are imminent. We need to keep the capacity going in our research facilities. Horticulture is kind of small in the scheme of Canadian agriculture. We don't export as much as other sectors, like grains and oilseeds or beef and pork. But horticulture is important. And we need to maintain our prominence in Canadian research. That's why we're gravely concerned with the slow recruitment of replacements to fill these important positions that work on industry priorities.

[Alex Atamanenko, NDP, British Columbia Southern Interior, BC]

Dr. Trevan, you touched on the issue of GMOs and helping to alleviate world hunger. Increases in yield have not been because of genetically modified traits. The answer to feed the world hasn't really come. They're developed basically for two traits: herbicide resistance and pesticide resistance.

On the other side, there are people on the ground, such as Oxfam, whom I met with a few days ago. There's also the Union of Concerned Scientists and IAASTD. They are saying that maybe what we have to do to feed the world is develop local sustainable agriculture, and give more weight to the local organic sector.

We have two points of view here. I'd like you to comment on them.

[Dr. Michael Trevan]

That's very interesting. One of the problems is that it's extremely complex. It is not as simple as saying you have to have a genetically modified plant or you have to go to organic agriculture. If you want a plant to be more productive, whether you bred it conventionally or used some form of genetic engineering, that plant is almost certainly going to require more water. Where is the water going to come from? Your strategy will depend on whether you're growing this stuff in an arid area, a semi-arid area, or a place with lots of water. And this is really what I was getting at when I was talking about a complex agricultural system.

It's easy for lobby groups to pick out one of these problems and demand that it has to be solved right now at all costs, without thinking of the unintended consequences of those actions. That is why I come back to making sure that the public is properly informed so they can make good choices, not choices based on partial information or on powerful lobbies. That is the thing that concerns me.

If it is more appropriate for a small farmer with a holding of maybe a hectare in India to grow crops organically using farmyard manure, that's fine. There is no one solution to this. But the problem is that as soon as you get into these issues, it often appears as though there's just one solution. And that's where we need to engage the public more in these debates about the importance of the agricultural industry. After all, we have to feed another three billion people and we only have 40 years to do it.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Okay. Thank you very much.

We will now move to Mr. Lemieux for five minutes.

[Pierre Lemieux, Conservative, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

It is an important part of our work as a committee in looking at science and innovation and on how we can improve in the way we support science and innovation. I would like to ask the BC Fruit Growers' Association a question.

You received some funding, about $2.3 million. It went to the Okanagan Plant Improvement Corporation to focus on new apple and sweet cherry varieties. The research is not being conducted by the government per se. We are moving money to a corporation that is coordinating the research. I wanted to know your input on that because you've been talking about government shortages in government research. I would say, too, there has been discussion about industry. Their strength is being focused on the needs of the farmers at this time and in the near-term future, but also the commercialization of the research that is being conducted. I am wondering if you might have some comments on where you see money being spent most effectively. Is it through government research stations and channels? Is it leaning towards the more private corporations that would conduct it on behalf of industry and organizations?

[Joe Sardinha]

Personally, I think it's a bit of both.

In terms of the Okanagan Plant Improvement Corporation, it is a wholly owned subsidiary of the BC Fruit Growers' Association. Clearly, their direction is to commercialize new varieties. It never was in their mandate to actually breed those varieties. Over time, we have developed a tremendous relationship with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in Summerland, with the plant breeders who were there. As you know, the Okanagan Plant Improvement Corporation does the commercializing of any new varieties developed at the Summerland station.

As time has gone on, naturally, through the DIAP program, PICO did apply to receive some substantial funds, as you've indicated—$2.3 million. That money is really going to flow a benefit across Canada in terms of what the breeding program in Summerland is able to supply. PICO will then turn those plant varieties and new cultivars around and allow producers in the various producing provinces across Canada to try those cultivars in their particular climactic region to see if they are viable and have potential to grow in their specific region. Much of the money allows trial planting on a limited basis throughout all of these provinces, such that the industry in Quebec, Nova Scotia, Ontario, or New Brunswick are given a chance to do first-hand trials. It is being funded through that very same DIAP program that PICO has.

I still see a really good, strong bond and relationship existing between the employees of AAFC and PICO. Also, on the commercialization side, PICO has been sharing royalties with AAFC to pay for some of the costs of the plant breeders. It has been a win-win situation. I think this has been a positive collaboration. I would sure hate to see it totally transferred to the industry, because what better example of collaboration—and we are talking about collaboration—can you have than industry working with researchers who are basically AAFC employees?

[Pierre Lemieux, Conservative, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

Okay. Thank you.

Let me ask Michael and Karin about commercialization.

Sometimes there is research done that is not necessarily commercialized, transferred into useful commodities that farmers can use, for example. We've heard from previous witnesses that this is certainly a concern, in that they feel with research resources being scarce, there is a real need to focus the research so that it can be commercialized and is ultimately useful to farmers.

I am wondering, from your perspective and experience, how you would see one being prioritized against another. It shouldn't be zero of one and a hundred percent of the other. There isn't much money spent on commercialization right now, and if there was a shift.... Could you make a comment on that--if there was a shift in research funding towards commercialization, and therefore research might be more focused but the end product might be more commercial?

[Dr. Karin Wittenberg]

Thank you. There are two points I would like to make.

The first is when I was referring to strategies that allow the various entities to work together through a continuum. The opportunity this presents is that the people at the front end doing the research have more opportunity to identify or to find out what the identified needs are at the working end of the producer, the processor, or the other industry members. We've sometimes lost that continuum. Perhaps we've had good research, but it hasn't been directed to where we need to be going. That's one of the points I want to make.

The second point is that we in Canada perhaps have a little bit of difficulty around how we manage IP--I think I'll put it that way. As a result, we sometimes see avoidance of getting into that pitfall because it's a huge human resource effort to move something through to commercialization. I think you've witnessed that probably within the ranks of AAFC, and we've witnessed it in the universities. Where it has worked very cleanly, very well, has been in areas like variety development, plant breeding programs. I think that is working well. In some cases we can say the same thing where IP is moving directly into a processing system. There are other examples, new assessment tools for environmental assessment, or other examples where it hasn't been that easy to move forward. That's one thing I'd like to share with you.

The types of issues we're addressing in agriculture are not simply focused on the identification of intellectual property for commercialization if we want to be successful. There are practices and processes that are very important to the operation of our farms and our primary and secondary processors that don't necessarily even need to go through that kind of process. What they need is the opportunity to bring new tools in so they can address the market as the market changes, or address the environmental elements as those elements change. To some extent what we want to do is be able to move forward on good practice and processes, for example, on green processing technologies, not necessarily to patent and protect, but rather to allow industry to pick up on it and use it as quickly as possible. So we have a few barriers there.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you.

Mr. Valeriote does not have any questions.

We'll move to Mr. Zimmer.

[Bob Zimmer, Conservative, Prince George—Peace River, BC]

It's good to see you, Joe. It's good to see somebody who still gets their hands dirty as part of our panel here.

I know you mentioned some concerns with the way the program had been run before. I want you to focus, and you already have, on the positive parts of our investments.

Can you explain in a little more depth the positive results of our program?

[Joe Sardinha]

In terms of the science cluster initiative?

[Bob Zimmer, Conservative, Prince George—Peace River, BC]

Absolutely, yes.

[Joe Sardinha]

There's more than one positive result. One was clearly that the five different commodity groups all came together as commodity groups, looked at their own provincial priorities, assessed what those research priorities were, and then looked at developing national priorities. That's where it really was a consensus-building exercise that resulted in some very positive work being done by each commodity group. From that, of course, some tremendous project proposals came forward to take advantage of what I believe was some pretty generous federal funding, with industry coming up with a 25% share. In some cases, it's difficult for industry to come up even with that, but we feel it was a very good funding percentage, because it was going to stimulate some much needed research work in those priority areas.

Perhaps one of the truly negative parts was this. We understood from other hort clusters that AAFC research centres were involved. When it came to the edible horticulture cluster, we found out at the 11th hour of the 11th day that no AAFC research centres or their employees would be permitted in any of these CHC projects, which was news to us. That's where some of the frustration comes in. It is when things aren't spelled out from the outset.

It has created a lot of headaches for industry but also for our national association, the Canadian Horticultural Council, which has gone to great lengths to make this thing work for their commodity representatives. I think they've done a tremendous job, not to say that AAFC staff haven't been accommodating in trying to work through these things too.

I think the initiative was so new--it was a new direction--that perhaps not all of the bugs were worked out as they should have been.

Going forward, I'd say that if the federal government wants to sort of repeat this initiative with the lessons that have been learned, I see a great opportunity. We're also, through this national research science cluster initiative, involving more universities and involving provincial research people, so the collaborations are happening on a much wider basis.

[Bob Zimmer, Conservative, Prince George—Peace River, BC]

You explained a few of those suggestions.

Could you give us your biggest suggestion to make it better next time? What would you do?

[Joe Sardinha]

The frustrating part is that you can't be throwing out changes to the program at the 11th hour.

I'll give you an example from just this past August. The Canadian Horticultural Council was originally told that $3.6 million, I think it was, would flow to the edible hort cluster initiative. It was scaled back to $2.7 million. So the commodity groups worked within that funding, knowing that there were some administrative costs as well for CHC, and we worked such that we identified the projects we wanted to do. We scaled back. Each commodity group got to choose one, in some cases maybe two, if there was enough funding. And we made it work.

Suddenly, 18 months into the Growing Forward initiative, we find out from AAFC that, lo and behold, there's another $900,000 available to the CHC. Well, it's a little bit late to be telling a national delivery organization that you have this extra funding available when the current projects are already well under way. And now, all of a sudden, you have 16 months, if you do identify some new projects for this additional funding, to conduct a research project that must end by March 31, 2013.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Okay, very good.

Thank you very much.

We'll now move to Ms. Raynault, and we'll come back to you, Mr. Valeriote, right after that.