Good afternoon, and thank you for the invitation to be here today.
My name is Peter MacLeod. I am the vice-president of chemistry at CropLife Canada.
With me today is my colleague Dennis Prouse, CropLife Canada's vice-president of government affairs.
CropLife Canada is the trade association that represents the developers, manufacturers, and distributors of crop protection products and plant biotechnology.
These tools help keep Canada's agriculture industry competitive and sustainable, and by delivering an affordable supply of safe and healthy food, help ensure that Canadians enjoy a high standard of living. Without pesticides and plant biotechnology, Canadian farmers and the Canadian economy would suffer enormous losses.
Crop quality and yield increases resulting from pesticides and plant biotechnology lead to direct gains for farmers of about $7.9 billion per year. This increased yield from crop protection products and plant biotechnology also benefit the average Canadian, especially at the grocery store, where the benefits of our technologies save Canadian families almost 60% at the checkout counter. Innovations in plant science technologies don't just boost agricultural productivity; they boost it in a sustainable way.
For example, pesticides and plant biotechnology have allowed farmers to adopt conservation or no-till farming practices. In 2008, for example, conservation tillage prevented 12 billion kilograms of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere. It also reduces fossil fuel use by more than 170 million litres a year, not to mention the benefits of water retention and soil erosion prevention.
Plus, if Canadian farmers didn't use pesticides and plant biotechnology, they would have to cultivate an additional 37 million acres of land to produce what they do today. This 37 million acres is about equal to all of the cultivated land in the province of Saskatchewan.
Canada's world-renowned regulatory system ensures that Canadian farmers have access to the latest innovations in technology. Both Health Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency do excellent work keeping Canadians and the environment safe. They are well respected internationally, largely because Canada's system is predictable and science-based and focuses on health and safety as top priorities. Yet here at home, Canadians know very little about the regulation of pesticides and plant biotechnology and their respective contribution to food security in Canada and around the world. This is unfortunate.
To give Canadians confidence in the regulation of the products that will inevitably be needed to feed the world and protect the environment, more needs to be done to educate the public about the good work our government does on their behalf. We commend the federal government for its recent movement in this regard, and are hopeful that Canadians will continue to receive information designed to educate them about the high calibre of Canada's science-based regulatory system. However, our first request is that more be done on this front.
If innovation is to truly flourish in Canada, government needs to help Canadians understand the benefits of technology and the systems in place to ensure that the technologies are safe. And, when required, it needs to defend the rigours of their regulatory system. Without this fundamental support, some of the most beneficial innovations in any of the range of sectors could easily wither on the vine simply for lack of public support.
Imagine if this had been the case when the canola industry was in its infancy. Today canola is an industry valued at $14 billion a year and is a huge Canadian success story, due in no small part to the pro-innovation foundation upon which it was built.
This challenge of putting innovation in context for the general public goes beyond federal government communications, however. Here in Canada there has been a worrying trend of provincial and municipal governments undermining the credibility of the federal government. Such an environment is untenable for industries such as ours.
Each new plant biotechnology or pesticide innovation requires a financial investment of $100 million to $250 million and takes as long as ten years to bring to market. Given the size of this investment, I am sure you can appreciate that our industry must be prudent about where it invests.
Unless our industry continues to invest in Canada, Canadian producers cannot possibly hope to compete with farmers in other countries where science-based regulations are respected and upheld. We encourage this committee to defend science-based regulations and to communicate with the public about the importance of innovation and science.
We would also like to see Canada champion a more integrated and harmonized international approval system for our technologies. Our belief is that much could be accomplished by opening up the approval process to recognize the work of and decisions by other countries that are committed to science-based regulations.
In this way, not only do we more efficiently and expeditiously offer Canadian farmers access to the latest tools, but we deliver better market access, without compromising safety or integrity of international regulatory systems.
We believe pest control products and plant biotechnology can continue to play a pivotal role for the transformation of Canada and the competitiveness of Canadian farmers. We also believe the extent of this role will depend on the decisions made and the actions taken within Growing Forward 2.
Farmers are facing extraordinary challenges--a ballooning world population, climate change, and water scarcity, just to name a few. All of these challenges can be met with modern solutions: drought- and salt-tolerant crops, better disease control, better nitrogen utilization, and foods with improved nutritional content. There's no doubt that advances in plant science technologies will continue to yield solutions for some of the world's greatest challenges. Rest assured we are working on these.
Canada's plant science industry supports an agricultural sector that is resilient, competitive, and sustainable. In fact, our commitment to sustainability goes back several decades. As an industry, we have long been committed to full life-cycle stewardship practices.
The best known of these programs are our obsolete pesticide and empty container programs, which are currently run through CleanFARMS, our sister organization. Add to that the research into technologies that will increase on-farm sustainability through such things as improved nitrogen utilization varieties, and it becomes clear that for our industry, sustainability is much more than a buzzword; it's a long-term commitment.
By improving the ability of crops to use nitrogen, we reduce the amount of money farmers pay for fertilizer and the amount of gas they use applying it, and at the same time we increase their profitability. Our industry also continues to refine pest-control products so that use rates can continue to be reduced and products and applications can become more targeted. Our industry is optimistic about the ability of Growing Forward 2 to develop a forward-thinking and enabling environment within which agricultural innovations can flourish.
We note that recently this government has made significant progress on such important agricultural policies as those concerning low-level presence and market access. We are encouraged by Minister Ritz's emphasis on science at the recent Cairns meetings.
We look forward to being a part of a dynamic, innovative, and highly competitive Canadian agricultural sector that works to benefit Canadians and the world around us.
Thank you for your time today.