Agriculture Committee on Oct. 25th, 2011

[Dr. K. Peter Pauls]

What we find is that our students coming out of agriculture-related programs have no difficulty finding jobs. In fact, I think we could have many more students in agriculture-related educational programs. That's at all levels. At the diploma level, our numbers have increased dramatically over the last few years. At the B.Sc. or the bachelor's level, those students have no difficulty finding jobs in all kinds of related areas. When we have job fairs, all of the major banks are there recruiting students, and then we have jobs for our graduate students as well. They are, as I say, in well-paying, good jobs, often in managerial-related of things, or sales. We have those kinds of small and large businesses that fit into the agricultural system.

For us, it's a story that's just not well-known.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

You still have more than a minute, Mr. Rousseau.

[Jean Rousseau, NDP, Compton—Stanstead, QC]

I would like to ask Mr. Groeneweg a question.

What is your industry doing to promote employment in canola production?

Should Growing Forward 2 include specific projects to address manpower needs in the industry?

[Franck Groeneweg]

It's very important to attract youth into agriculture. In our projects, we work with scholarships to ensure that the canola industry attracts very talented people, people who are interested in canola production and canola research and all of the areas that can improve and enhance our production. It is important make the industry accessible to producers as well. Agriculture is a very capital-intensive activity, so it is important that all of this is being looked at.

As an organization, we focus more on production and use of the crop to make it sustainable and to improve our own crop industry. As a farmer, I'll say it again: attracting youth into the industry is very important. It probably starts with making sure that the food is being valued at the consumer level. That's what triggers the interest in our industry.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Okay, thank you very much.

We'll now move to Mr. Lemieux.

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

Thank you very much, Chair.

Before I ask a question, I want to clear up a point.

Mr. Valeriote spoke about NSERC, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council. The point I want to make, because we can arrive at the wrong conclusions based on what Mr. Valeriote said, is that decisions taken by NSERC are not influenced by the government. They receive funding for research and innovation from the government, but the projects that are submitted to them are done through peer review. I believe hundreds of people are involved. They break into committees, they review applications, and they make the decisions. They don't report to the Minister of Agriculture; they report to the Minister of Industry.

I think these are important points because in this study, the agriculture committee is looking at Growing Forward and what this policy framework can do with agriculture funding for science and research. And I think the comment on NSERC was off base.

Science and innovation are important across all sectors—and in agriculture for sure. That's why we're looking at this.

As a final point, Chair, NSERC's funding in 2006 was about $860 million, and in 2009-10 it was over $1 billion. So the government has played its role in increasing funding for science and research, but when it comes down to the decision-making process and what gets approved and what doesn't, that rests with peer review within NSERC and is not within purview of the government. I wanted to clarify that because I thought it was an important point.

Following up on science and innovation within agriculture, I would like to pursue this concept of marketability. Many moons ago more research was done that did not necessarily lead to marketable solutions. Normally, the more short term the research is, the more marketable it is within the short term. People see that connection more easily.

So I wanted to ask you, Mr. Pauls, regarding short-term, mid-term, and long-term research projects, and their marketability, could you advise the committee on which kind of projects you think should take priority for the agricultural sector in this current climate? Should there be short-term projects or mid-term projects? It's probably a smattering of both, but I'm wondering if you could comment on where you see value in each of these sectors.

[Dr. K. Peter Pauls]

A short-term project might look at registering a particular existing herbicide for a new crop. It might take a few years of data to say it's safe and effective, but it wouldn't fund the development of a new herbicide, for example. That takes a long-term effort. It wouldn't fund the development of a new crop variety. Again, that takes a long-term effort for those kinds of things. Even once you have a new idea and a new application, the process of commercialization is multi-step, and it sometimes takes a whole new set of skills for that to happen.

You're right, there needs to be a mixture of funding opportunities and timelines there.

I think that the short term is sometimes a little more obvious, because it's solving problems on a go-forward question. Do we use it for this or do we not use it for that? And so it sometimes seems as if it's a little more immediately applicable.

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

Thanks.

Mr. Groeneweg, with the canola projects that you see in your position, can you give the committee a feeling as to the types of projects involved and the percentage of them that would fall into the short-term category, the mid-term category, and long-term category? Do any of those categories have an influence on the marketability of the projects in the end?

[Franck Groeneweg]

Thinking about it quickly, what we're looking at would be in equal thirds. Generally, when we're looking at long-term projects, we're probably venturing out on a limb with some questions that we're trying to answer, which are very important and more encompassing of the whole canola industry.

On short-term projects, it's as if one is able to see the end already and has a pretty good idea of what is going to happen, but maybe also trying to capitalize on some of the findings from the long-term projects. So it's more than likely that the short-term projects will be more commercialized.

In discussions in our committee, we always want to be sure to allocate some dollars to projects that we sometimes feel are a very long shot. But we need to be able to take risks out there, because although we might come to the end of a project and not have figured out a whole lot, at times it will indicate to farmers, “Do not venture that way”, and avoids unnecessary risk for producers. So it is very important that we look for success, but we need to figure on there being a certain number of failures that might in fact be valuable to the whole industry.

Sometimes we may be even a little too conscious of trying to find the big diamond out there, and we also need to make sure that we are careful in our risk management.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Groeneweg, and Mr. Pauls, thank you very much for being with us today. We very much appreciate your presentations and your answers to our many questions.

Next we have with us Dr. Douglas Freeman, dean of the Western College of Veterinary Medicine. We also have Matthew Holmes, executive director of the Canadian Organic Trade Association. Welcome.

Mr. Freeman, you're first on the agenda, for 10 minutes or less, please.

[Dr. Douglas Freeman, Dean, Western College of Veterinary Medicine, University of Saskatchewan]

Thank you very much. It's a privilege to speak with you here today.

As mentioned, I'm representing the Western College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan.

There are four key points I want to make in my brief statements today. These focus on the One Health initiative; food safety; the issue of disease surveillance; and finally, the role of education, which I would be remiss not to talk about.

Regarding the One Health initiative, it's an initiative that recognizes the connection between animal health, public health, and environmental health. And it's really all about creating linkages and breaking down silos. I note that this was a goal of Growing Forward as well, in creating the science clusters and trying to bring together teams from different areas and promoting collaboration.

A current example on our campus would be developing faculty chairs. As funding is considered for various places, I would support the role of funding things like faculty chairs. A chair in an area like food safety would serve to bring various specialists from multiple different areas together to work on a common theme.

The University of Saskatchewan is the only campus with all the health sciences on one campus—and, again, following that One Health model we bring all of the health science colleges and deans together through a common council. One Health is important if you think about the over 1,400 known infectious micro-organisms. Over 60% of those are zoonotic, meaning they are transmissible between animals and people. If you look at new emerging or re-emerging diseases, 75% of them are transmissible between animals and people. So One Health is a key area in terms of agriculture and animal health, and veterinary medicine and public health.

Many of these diseases can cause very serious illness or even pandemic threats. We've all read the papers or experienced issues with avian influenza, SARS, or even tuberculosis and mad cow disease. I would comment that when the Prime Minister visited the campus not too long ago for the opening of InterVac, he commented that 18 cases of BSE had resulted in a $6.5 billion economic impact.

Regarding food safety, something in the neighbourhood of 76 million Americans per year suffer from food-borne illness, and of those, 5,000 die. In Canada the estimates are somewhere between 11 million and 13 million cases of food-borne illness annually, with a chronic health problem resulting in 2% to 3% of those, at a potential cost of $12 billion to $14 billion. Some of those case numbers are probably underestimated. It's our sense that many of the cases of actual food-borne illness go unreported.

So for a food safety program, important deliverables would be disease investigation and prevention; the training of trained, qualified professionals, again recognizing the broad range of interests that would be important to food safety; ongoing action and research, with that work informing public policy, science, and the policy links, and addressing the whole spectrum from the farm to the fork; and then, of course, the One Health application as well.

There are a number of key stakeholders for food safety. I have a list in my speaking notes, including federal and provincial agencies; producer groups; the food industries; the Canadian Cooperative Wildlife Health Centre; and first nations communities. But the reality is that everyone who eats food is a stakeholder when it comes to food safety. And there is a broad range of those stakeholders and partners.

I mentioned disease surveillance and would point out in this regard that's it's important to focus on rapid disease diagnostics, disease containment, loss mitigation as a result of that, and market preservation. It's important because we need to maintain markets through the health of our national herd, and to provide a safe and secure food supply, and maintain public health by minimizing the potential for zoonotic disease transmission. Disease transmission is critical in all those areas.

It's an area where there is a lot of connection and cooperation as well.

At the Western College of Veterinary Medicine, we have a disease investigation unit that goes out and investigates disease outbreaks at the farm level. A diagnostic lab, through Prairie Diagnostic Services, facilitates those diagnoses. The toxicology centre connects us to the school of the environment. We work with the Canadian Cooperative Wildlife Health Centre, which is a critical component of disease surveillance in the wildlife population that, again, comes in contact with our production animals and people as well. And, of course, in our college's example, there are our traditional and strong ties with agriculture and bioresources.

I would also stress the importance of the Canadian Animal Health Surveillance Network, a network supported by CFIA that links the animal health diagnostic labs together, and also links them to the Public Health Laboratory Network.

Finally, I'd like to stress the role of academia and the important role of knowledge creation in developing expertise in new technology, including through graduate education and broad research initiatives for educating and training the next generation of highly qualified professionals and preparing the next generation of innovators; developing new tools; and linking knowledge and skills interprofessionally, for instance, through the One Health initiative and the multiple disciplines related to areas such as food safety.

I think it's important for universities to be able to address regional strengths and regional issues and then to cooperate nationally. Oftentimes, it seems that when federal funding is sought, we're looking to fund the same process nationally. As an example, in Saskatoon we're one of the few research centres for beef. Prince Edward Island would be an area for aquatic disease investigation, and so forth. It's important that we be able to fund regional strengths and that those universities then cooperate with each other. There is strong cooperation between the veterinary schools and the colleges of agriculture across Canada.

I have a final comment regarding funding. I think it's important to consider going beyond funding on a project-by-project basis and to consider investing in people and programs as well, in order to develop those new projects.

With that I'll end my comments. Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you very much.

We'll go to Mr. Holmes for 10 minutes or less.

[Matthew Holmes, Executive Director, Canada Organic Trade Association]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and honourable members. I'm very pleased to be speaking with you today.

My name is Matthew Holmes and I am the executive director of the Canada Organic Trade Association. COTA's members reflect all points along the organic value chain in Canada, from producers to processors, the research community, and traders. I am also a world board member of the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements, and the regulatory chair of Agriculture Canada's organic value chain round table.

The Canadian organic sector is growing rapidly, and the domestic market is now worth an estimated $2.6 billion per year, an increase of 160% in four years' time. Our international trade continues to grow through strategic government supports and the negotiation of progressive trade deals with our major trading partners. The organic sector has roughly 4,000 producers farming and ranching 900,000 hectares of land, with over 40% of these operations on the Canadian Prairies—Saskatchewan in particular. Additionally, we have about 1,200 processors and handlers in the domestic organic value chain. However, our market is growing faster than our production. We must respond to this opportunity by remaining adaptive and competitive and applying the science-based information and tools at our disposal.

Organic agriculture offers compelling solutions for today's challenges in agriculture. It is a low-input system and has much to offer all agriculture in terms of innovative methods to reduce input costs and reliance among producers. Organic agriculture is premised on the science of crop rotation, nutrient cycling, and integrated pest management. It has been shown to increase biodiversity and resilience on and around the farm, to sequester carbon into the soil, to reduce energy usage on farm, and it can also lead to lower nutrient run-off into our waterways. These are challenges that all agriculture seeks to address.

Additionally, organic production tends to offer an attractive financial model of a growth market, high consumer demand, and fair incomes for farming families. Our producers tend to be younger than the average producer in Canada, and our model attracts a large number of new entrant farmers. Again, these are priorities that we share with all agriculture.

This does, however, lead to the need for significant knowledge transfer, infrastructure supports, and extension services. We have seen a few provinces explore new ways of assisting producers in adopting innovative attribute-based production. In Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick, for example, the provincial governments have established programs to provide partial financial credit for the costs of organic certification through the initial transition period. This has led to an increase in organic operators to meet consumers' demand for this attribute, but also the reinvestment of available funds into other needs, such as knowledge transfer and the adoption of new science. In Quebec, a multifunctional pilot program seeks to create incentives for producers to meet clearly identified outcomes, such as increased biodiversity and resource management. This sort of innovative programming in the long run will assist in making the agricultural sector more sustainable, economically and environmentally.

Growing Forward 2, in our opinion, presents the federal government with the chance to work with the provinces to expand this type of program across the country in a coordinated way. Under Growing Forward, the federal government invested in the science clusters. The organic science cluster has received over $6.5 million in federal commitments and $2.2 million in industry dollars. The model is highly integrated, bringing industry, government, researchers, and academics together.

The organic science cluster involves work by over 50 researchers in nine provinces, at nine universities, and ten Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada research stations. It is managed by the Organic Agriculture Centre of Canada at the Nova Scotia Agricultural College. The research is directed and controlled by industry-identified priorities, so it is designed to have an impact and to be marketable. For example, the organic science cluster is conducting a wheat and oat breeding program to identify varieties optimized for low-input systems, the findings of which can benefit all models of production, particularly those exploring standardized low-input production systems. This in turn leads to new high-demand markets and competitiveness for Canadian commodities.

The cluster is also studying innovative greenhouse production methods, including inputs, growth media, integrated pest management, high-efficiency lights, and nutrient recycling. By investing in this knowledge creation and application, the government and industry together are supporting the adaptability, innovativeness, and competitiveness of Canada's organic sector.

Consumer trends clearly show that attribute-based models are becoming drivers of agricultural production, whether it is identify preservation and traceability, animal welfare and husbandry standards, or consumer desires for systems avoiding the use of synthetics and genetic engineering. Organic production offers these attributes, with the added control of operating within a regulated and standardized system. Therefore, research into organic agriculture is a great opportunity to study various attributes and production models with a clear focus on marketability, profitability, and sustainability.

We recommend that Growing Forward 2 continue to show leadership and foresight in the area of integrated scientific research.

The Canadian organic sector has quickly become the envy of the world, even though we remain a relatively small player. Since the organic products regulations and mandatory national standards were introduced in 2009, the federal government has pursued the market access priorities identified by COTA's long-term international strategy. These include the equivalency agreements that were reached with the U.S. in 2009 and the EU in 2011. I cannot stress this next point enough: Canada is the only country in the world whose standards are recognized by these two markets. Combined, the U.S. and EU markets are worth 96% of all global sales in organics, estimated at approximately $56 billion per year. The U.S. and the EU do not even recognize each other's systems, but they have made significant progress towards reaching equivalency between them. From my perspective, there is no better time than now to scale up Canadian organic production.

With the support of the agri-marketing program under Growing Forward, COTA has been able to lead export missions and provide assistance to members of the Canadian industry seeking to reach new customers and take advantage of improved market access. We see this as a critical means to developing the capacity of the domestic sector. Specifically, it allows us to meet all of the outcomes of the Growing Forward 2 discussion papers: competitiveness, market growth, adaptability, and sustainability. We encourage the continued focus on international opportunities under Growing Forward 2.

However, as the Growing Forward 2 discussion documents also make clear, our international competitiveness is based on the quality and responsiveness of our infrastructure. Particularly for innovative attribute-based systems such as organic ones, codified standards are essential to ensure that the broad outcomes are met.

Our trading partners and our competitors, the U.S. and EU, have made commitments to maintaining their organic infrastructure by way of long-term standards maintenance. Canada has not. And although we are currently the poster child of organic market access, without long-term sustainable infrastructure behind the organic sector in Canada, we will soon lose this position, or fail to meet the obligations of our current trade agreements. This is an acute concern of the organic sector at this time, and we are looking to work with you to address it.

To conclude, we see great opportunity at this time for the agricultural sector in Canada to collectively benefit from the innovation, sustainability, and profitability the organic sector is pursuing. There is a need for governments to coordinate ways of assisting new entrants into organic agriculture in order to meet consumer demand. And there is need to continue advancing the science and innovation involved through the integrated research that is the heart of our competitiveness and adaptability.

Finally, through our progressive market access approach, our sector is positioned for success, if we can ensure that it has the right infrastructure supports in place to remain competitive and responsive to opportunity.

Thank you very much for your time and attention.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you very much.

We'll now move to questioning.

Mr. Allen, for five minutes.

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, both of you, for your presentations.

Mr. Holmes, you talked about the sense of opportunity. One of the things I think the committee always wants to see for farm groups is opportunities.

How do you see innovation and research in the organic sector? You talked about an opportunity and the lack of folks to take up that opportunity—or at least, those who are there don't seem to be able to reach the potential.

What sorts of things do we need to structure for the organic sector? As it's one of the most rapidly growing parts of the agricultural sector, what do we need to do specifically to help the sector reach its potential and to get to where it needs to be? What do we need to do at this moment in time to take advantage of the opportunity presented by our regulations being accepted by the two markets where nearly everything goes as far as the organic sector is concerned?

[Matthew Holmes]

Thank you for the question.

We've had a wonderful relationship up until now with the government, and we hope to continue to do so. We actually approached the government as early as 1999 and asked to be regulated, because this is a condition for success for us. The organic sector is premised on traceability systems and on assurance and oversight. That's what consumers expect and want. Being regulated and having national standards in place was a critical part of that.

We're growing very quickly, as you've noted. Because the consumer demand is growing faster than our production in Canada, it means, of course, that the market is driven by imports.

We're also pursuing great opportunities in export markets. We've had in place some programs to assist us with that, but if we're looking at what some of our major trading partners in those developed areas have done, such as in the U.S. and EU, I would note that the U.S. Farm Bill has made specific designations for organic agriculture and earmarks for it. The EU's common agricultural policy has specific designations and supports for organic agriculture, primarily to build that production base and value chain domestically.

I would say that in Canada we're at that point right now. We need to look at ways in which.... There is great opportunity here, but we do need to create some incentive. There's a very difficult transition time, typically of about three years, when producers move to organic agriculture and their yields drop, and sometimes significantly. There are challenges as the new model is brought onto that land.

So the programs that have prioritized getting producers through that period have been very successful around the world. They lead in turn to a more robust domestic sector in the long run.

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

If I'm following you, it seems to me that some support systems are needed to help us in the transition. As you pointed out, there is a transition.

From a science-based perspective, I appreciate the codification aspect, because I think you're right that it's extremely important. It's unusual for us to have a group come to us and say “Please regulate us”. Usually we hear the opposite. It's “Please don't regulate us”, or “Please take regulations away”. It's enlightening to hear a group say, “Regulations are how we can be good at what we do and be successful”.

I'm wondering if there's a role for innovation and science to play in helping us with the transition, besides the money piece--understanding, of course, that as the transition yields go down, there's a cashflow issue.

Is there a role for the universities, the clusters, to play in helping us transition across that and perhaps reduce the transition period? Is there a role for them to play?

[Matthew Holmes]

The research coming out of the organic cluster is still early, but some areas of research and inquiry are absolutely directed along those lines. What are the best rotations? What are some of the best applicable production methods for our climate and geography here in Canada, based on our organic standards in Canada, which are unique to Canada?

So the cluster and the science research will play a critical role in the arsenal or tool box of information that we have. The next challenge is the knowledge transfer. We have a significant number of new entrants to farming, period. Many have not farmed before. We also have an entire shift into a new way of farming, namely, the use of organic production methods, and the learning curve can be steep.

That knowledge transfer, with the significant gains we make in understanding through research, also needs to make its way through extension supports or other means to the producers in Canada.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you very much.

We'll now move to Mr. Payne for five minutes.

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'd like to welcome the witnesses here today. I appreciate the time you are taking in coming here to make your presentations to us.

First of all, Dr. Freeman, you talked about several areas in your presentation, including One Health initiative and food safety. What types of research do you see are needed, and how would they help, in terms of Growing Forward 2, in any of those particular areas? Do you have anything specific that you'd be looking at?

[Dr. Douglas Freeman]

Thank you. That is actually a really important question, one that we can probably spend a long time at.

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

We have about three and a half minutes.

[Dr. Douglas Freeman]

I guess for me the most important thing for both of those topics, the One Health initiative and food safety in particular, is that they represent broad collaborations of topic areas. So for food safety, these include understanding how the numbers of pathogens may be increasing in cattle, how to decrease the exposure in the processing plants, and how to educate the public to avoid potential food safety issues. When I go to restaurants, I still get asked how I would like my hamburger cooked, which should never be a question.

And likewise with the One Health initiative, how do we connect? Over the past year we have been trying to connect the medical school deans in Canada with the veterinary school deans. There are issues there of inter-professional education and testing methods—for example, looking at rabies and its pathogenesis in dog bites, and the knowledge-base of physicians and their understanding of how to treat medical patients in that regard, and managing tuberculosis in areas in the north where country foods are important.

So those are all topics that are currently being looked at, and there are more, but the important thing in those areas is to be able to bring broad collaborative groups together.

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

Well, that was really one of my questions. How do you get people, from the farm to the fork to the researchers, all together to make sure that this research is done—the right research to end up with food safety?

[Dr. Douglas Freeman]

I'll speak of my experience prior to coming to the University of Saskatchewan and then of being there as well. In my experience, the people in those areas are interested in working together on that topic. So, for instance, in our projects on food safety at North Dakota State University, the experts in risk communication were eager to get out and meet with the producers and to understand how to deliver the message back to the producers on what they could do to mitigate risks for food safety or on how to get the message out to the people working in a processing plant that HACCP controls are important and needed to be followed. The agricultural engineers wanted to work with the microbiologists to develop ways of identifying signals of contamination of meat at the store level.

So when you have an important question like that, people will come together. Again with academia and the extension programs and things like that, part of our role is to get that information back out to the appropriate groups.

So how do we do it? I think I mentioned chairs, for example. We're in the process of forming a chair on food safety. When you have somebody of knowledge and stature in an area who can work to be the person who brings all of those groups together, it can be very effective.