Agriculture Committee on April 28th, 2014

[The Chair, Conservative, Bev Shipley]

I want to now go to Mr. Payne, please, for five minutes.

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

Thank you, Chair. I'm sure you're going to give me the same amount of extra time.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bev Shipley]

It was actually the witnesses that took that up.

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

Yes, right.

Anyway, I want to thank the witnesses for attending here, including by video conference. Obviously, innovation in research and development is very important. I know that CropLife is certainly looking at that. And there's the biotechnology.

Dr. Yarrow, you started to talk about that. I think you touched a little bit on canola. My recollection is that in the next number of years, I think in the next 10 years, they're talking about huge increases in canola.

Is that due to the biotechnology and the genomics?

[Dr. Stephen Yarrow]

As a quick answer, in part, yes, for sure....

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

What else would...?

[Dr. Stephen Yarrow]

Agronomic practices, better machinery, GPS, getting a better sense of the moisture content in the field in more precise ways, all these things contribute.

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

You touched a little bit on biotechnology and how it has increased. Do you have any other examples you would want to talk about specifically?

[Dr. Stephen Yarrow]

Not really, but I think we have to put this into the perspective of what plant breeding is s all about, and what people have been trying to achieve for the last 100 to 200 years of plant breeding.

It's all about keeping ahead of nature, keeping ahead of the new insect pests and diseases, rusts in wheat, and all these sorts of things.

Plant biotechnology as we know it today has played a part in improving those things, and I think broadly speaking, with genetic technologies, including what our colleagues talked about on the genomic side, we're going to see tremendous gains in the future.

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

Thank you.

I have some questions for you, Dr. Pontarollo. It was interesting. You made a comment about long-term funding. My understanding is that we have already put in something like $3 billion into Growing Forward 2, including a 50% increase for cost-shared initiatives.

I'm wondering how you see that. I mean, that sounds like a lot of money to me that's been put in by the federal government.

[Dr. Reno Pontarollo]

Yes, and believe me, I'm sure those who have received that money are taking it very happily. Three billion dollars is a lot of money. What we're seeing with the Growing Forward 2 program is a lot of consortium-based research initiatives that involve a number of different institutes and a number of different scientists.

These are still short-term projects of four to five years in length. They can apply back again for funding after this time period, but the type of long-term funding commitment I was thinking about or referring to was A-based long-term funding that a single scientist can work on, or a single group of scientists can work on, a single aspect of research for a long period of time.

This type of funding used to exist within the AAFC system and in some respect in other organizations as well, but this type of research support has dwindled in favour of short-term projects, for high impact, quick results, etc.

There is time to think about revisiting the former model and maybe arriving at some sort of a hybrid model to help us think not only about the short-term needs, but about the long-term strategic needs as well.

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

I understand that there was some $65 million for Genome Canada in 2013. I don't know if you have any comments on that.

[Dr. Reno Pontarollo]

Yes, I do. We appreciate it. Thank you.

Genome Canada received $65 million to fund future projects. Of that they are allocating approximately $30 million to a call that's going to be launched in the next few days called “Feeding the Future.” It's going to fund agrifood, aquaculture, and fisheries. It's split; it's not all for agriculture and livestock. Fisheries and aquaculture are there too.

Some of that money is going towards a competition to be announced next year in primary resources—energy, mining, and forestry. Again, all of those projects will be three-to-five-year projects, with large consortiums. I think the largest size of any one project will be $10 million. Genome Canada will put $3 million towards that. The other $6 million has to come from a matching contribution either from the provinces or private industry, or some other form, including international partners, etc.

So that's the nature of that funding. It's very low-risk funding, for very low-risk projects, and it's milestone oriented. It's not as you would say “risky” in any sense or manner.

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

My other question would be how much other funding do you get from either private sources or some other matching funds from provinces?

[Dr. Reno Pontarollo]

Since I joined the organization, Genome Prairie has been successful in leveraging about 3:1. In some projects I can leverage 5:1 for the federal investment.

The provinces that I would deal with, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, like to see at least a 3:1 leverage on their investment.

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

Okay.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bev Shipley]

You're well over two. I appreciate that.

Thank you, Mr. Payne.

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

Thank you very much, gentlemen.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bev Shipley]

Now we'll got to Mr. Eyking for five minutes.

Actually I'll give you a little more, because we've given the other ones a little more for the first round. I didn't read the clock right the first time.

[Mark Eyking, Liberal, Sydney—Victoria, NS]

The Liberals should get twice as much anyways because we have better questions.

Mr. Chair, thank you.

Thank you, guests, for coming here.

Doctor, I'll go back to you. When you look at the opportunity Canada has to produce food for the world with climate change and with consumers in Asia especially liking our products and with an increasing population there, I think you mentioned your growing future. How do we capitalize on that? Others, whether Brazil or Argentina or Australia, are going to be competing with us, and I'm sure they're investing in their industries also.

I'm very interested in what you said about looking at this ten-year strategy, looking way ahead of the curve and investing in projects that will position us to be one of the leading suppliers of food for around the world, and also in Canada.

Can you expand a little bit on that? I don't know if you can talk about some of the projects you'd like to see, if you're looking through a ten-year lens, or about how you would structure those with partnerships for the ten years. If, say, we were embarking on certain crops, projecting for climate change, and for consumers, where would we want to be in ten years to be number one in the world?

[Dr. Reno Pontarollo]

First, I'd just clean up a little myth about Canada feeding the world. The truth is that we produce a very low percentage of the amount of food produced in the world. Our significant advantage is that we export about 80% of the food we produce. That's probably always going to be the case even with our population growth, given the increase in yields that we're going to get in both our crop and our livestock production.

When you think about how we want to be positioned for the next few years, Dr. Yarrow talked about the increase in yields being attributed to genetics, and we can expect that incremental type of improvement for the next little while. He could probably talk more about some details with that.

When you're talking about the long ten-, fifteen-, twenty-, or twenty-five-year projects like canola—and the lentil industry was, because some thirty years ago there were no lentils planted in Saskatchewan, and now we're the world's leading producer—those types of projects are more game changers or game breakers.

Technologies like apomixis being brought into the fold, into the breeding systems, would be game breakers. Nitrogen-fixing wheat would be a game breaker. Some of this research is being done, but these things will take a long time to be fruitful. Those are the types of projects that I'm thinking about when you're talking about the long term.

We should partner appropriately, and we should partner with the best. In our flax and wheat projects we partner with entities in the United States and India. Partnering with India is very strategic because they are a significant trading partner for Saskatchewan. Almost all of the 50% of Canada's trade with India is done via Saskatchewan. You should do research with the people you are going to be trading with.

We're working right now on a partnership with Northern Ireland and with the Republic of Ireland. The expertise we will tap into there will primarily be in the livestock area, because that's what they do, and they also have good forage management as well. They also export 80% of their food, so there are a lot of similarities.

[Mark Eyking, Liberal, Sydney—Victoria, NS]

Thank you very much.

I'm going to try to get my last question to the CropLife people here.

We have a free trade agreement with Europe. Governments and, I think, all parties like to have science-based decisions. I think that's the right way to do it, but the reality is that a lot of the decision-making process—and you see this in Europe—involves emotion or is based on emotion or the information that one individual receives.

How can we as government work with stakeholders, besides just staying in our own box and making only science-based decisions, when there is concern about GMO foods and if we're going to be selling into Europe? We will have to do a selling job showing that our food is not “Frankenfood” or whatever you want to call it, because we can't just be sitting here making those decisions. What part can government play with your industries to get the word out there that Corn Flakes are still safe?

[Dennis Prouse]

I would say that in the short term—and Dr. Yarrow can certainly have more to say about this—the concern is low-level presence.

What we need globally is an agreement on low-level presence so that at least shipments that are containing trace amounts aren't being turned back, and that trace amounts of a genetically modified crop aren't being used as a non-tariff trade barrier.

In the immediate short-term, LLP would be a tremendous facilitator for trade, and Dr. Yarrow may want to add a number of things on that.

[Dr. Stephen Yarrow]

Actually, when I was listening to your question I had a slightly different answer in mind, but it touches on what our friends at Genome Prairie were talking about, and that's around education.

If decisions are being made for political and emotional reasons, as is happening in European countries, then that's something we need to address globally, by raising awareness about what this is all about, what plant breeding is all about, what farming is all about at a very basic level, and then build on that to try to explain what we're trying to do to improve varieties.

We're just an extension of plant breeding. That's all it is.

[Mark Eyking, Liberal, Sydney—Victoria, NS]

Shouldn't we be at that now, if we're going to be there in a few years with our products?