Fair enough. Thanks for that.
The point I'd like to link to innovation, though, is that we need to develop a broad range of policy platforms in order to prepare for what many business experts and scientists are describing as an extraordinary crisis that seems to be unfolding. There are a number of places around the world that are struggling with food crises. I think Canadian agricultural policy has a strong role to play in addressing this global crisis, which cuts through our Canadian system as well.
I'd like to direct my attention to four broad areas. The first broad strategy, which gets discussed at a range of fora, including business and scientific groups at the grassroots level, is that we need to be investing in science and technology to boost productivity.
Europe has tripled productivity over the last 50 years. Other data show how productivity and investment in Africa have resulted in 1,000 kilograms of grain per hectare over the last 50 years. We see that the green revolution has worked extraordinarily well in some parts of the world but not in others.
This applies to Canada as well. When I was working in the U.K., the Department for International Development, DFID, and the DEFRA, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, were working together to develop science and innovation platforms that drew on western academic expertise to address global food security.
If you have the opportunity to think broadly and at a global scale about the Growing Forward 2 program, I would encourage you to look for opportunities to develop new partnerships that might result in new technologies capable of being applied at the grassroots level in different parts of the world.
There's a strong argument throughout the literature that we need more research and innovation to further government regulation for environmental management. This cuts through all the debates that I've been part of. We get a strong sense of this when we start looking at things like nutrient run-offs from the livestock industry. We need a strong government mandate to develop tougher environmental regulations.
The third type of strategy related to the global food crisis is that we need to develop technologies to store food better. This is an extraordinarily important point that has social policy, engineering, and technical aspects to it. We need better technologies to store food. We also need to understand the scale at which we need to store food.
I wanted to highlight the importance of storing food in ancient societies and to link that to agricultural policy. There is the biblical story of Pharaoh's dream, where Pharaoh dreams of seven good years followed by seven bad years. The public policy advice Pharaoh adopted was to develop infrastructure and store food. We don't do that anywhere near enough. I think the world has forgotten this lesson—it's embarked on a just-in-time food system. For six years we've eaten at a global scale more than we have produced. This is a mistake.
The latest United Nations report on the global food crisis says that the world does not have enough food in its reserves to survive a bad harvest without markets dissolving into significant turmoil and volatility.
The fourth and final solution that is debated about the global food crisis and the sort of science and technology public policy we ought to be embarked on in order to prepare proactively for what some people are calling “a looming crisis” is that we need to do a better job of creating alternative food systems that sit alongside the mainstream or global food system. This is sometimes called the local food movement.
To me, there are two very important reasons the local food movement is going to be critical in the next generation. First of all, it increases the level of literacy among people to food issues. Second, the local food movement, local food systems, provide an insurance policy or a plan B, a buffer that separates the urban consumer from the vagaries of the international market. If the predictions are correct and over the next generation we see radically increasing prices in food, radically more volatile food prices, if these start having the expected political ramifications, we will be glad to have maintained these alternative food systems.
On my last slide I've tried to lay out the four broad policy arenas that are talked about with some degree of seriousness—a strong degree of seriousness—by activists, business leaders, and academics, as a way of proactively preparing ourselves for what some people call the perfect storm of problems that will come in the next generation.
I would like to leave you with one message. If you have the opportunity in deliberating on the Growing Forward 2 program to think globally and holistically, we need strategic investments across these four sectors.
We need strategic investments in science and technology, but emphasizing links between scientists and farmers from around the world. That requires some creative problem solving on the part of different institutions.
We need the managerial and bureaucratic solutions. We need the alternative solutions. And we need to understand how much, and where, food can be stored efficiently.
We need essentially a portfolio of strategies in order to protect ourselves and protect our food system.
In my last few breaths here I would like to say one thing, and that is I think Canada's role in the international food system will grow over the next generation. Our role as a food producer and a food exporter—our resource base—means that as the international food system comes in for what most expect will be some fairly turbulent times, Canada's role will grow. I think this represents a core opportunity for the Canadian agrifood business, as well as a challenge to our international development and humanitarian responsibilities. These things should, and can, be brought together through strategic investments in the four areas I have laid out.
Thank you very much.