You need a portfolio of research in the context of the agrifood system. I'm always nervous about a grow local food sovereignty model, in that we are a very large producer on per capita terms of many foodstuffs, which we could never consume locally. So we need to be able to access the things we can't produce effectively and efficiently in Canada—bananas, a lot of the tropical fruits and vegetables, and many of the foodstuffs that just don't fit within either our industrial system or agro-environmental system. But we also need to maintain the competitiveness and the capacity to sustainably produce large volumes of competitively priced grains, oilseeds, red meats, and a variety of other less traditional but very important high-value-added activities.
Environmental policy is an inextricable part of that. It sometimes is explicitly environmental, and sometimes it's simply embedded and embodied in the research around the seed or the animal itself. Reducing waste in the food system, which my colleague had mentioned.... We've got the deputy director general of the FAO who just gave a speech a few minutes ago, and she pointed out that 30% of the world's food that is produced is never consumed by anything that adds value, an animal or a human being. It's wasted. And that's not just in developing countries; that's in many developed nations. Canada is actually on the better end of that spectrum.
So if we could reduce food loses, that has strong environmental effects. There are some areas where sometimes the food losses might be more mechanical than biological—the cold chains and other mechanisms. Sometimes it's dealing with the food in the field. Sometimes it's dealing with the seed in the input side that may reduce the susceptibility of the plants or the animals to disease and wastage in the food chain.
I think the environment is a critical part, but my strong view.... And this is partly a western Canadian view, and I respect that—in western Canada in particular the agrifood system is almost universally export focused; the volumes that are produced are inappropriate to the domestic demands of a population of about 33 million people. My strong view is that the export focus part of the agrifood economy does need to be environmentally sound, but it also needs to be moving towards being competitive with the leading edge of the global agrifood system.