Thank you very much for the opportunity to present to you today and to field your questions. I won't take up much time with the introduction, because hopefully the main value will come from our discussion.
We've been focusing on food waste for quite a few years. It's only since 2010, when we published our first report “Food Waste in Canada”, which brought the topic of food waste to the fore of many people's thinking across the Canadian agrifood industry, that we identified it as a key issue for us as an industry and as a society going forward both domestically and internationally, particularly given the importance of exports to us.
Food waste is an enormous environmental and economic issue that is reflected in the fact that this House of Commons committee is focusing on it. Yet it still flies under the radar of many businesses and organizations, often because we do not measure it and do not know enough about it to implement effective policies and programs, whether we're speaking from the public, governmental, or federal-provincial levels, or from the individual businesses and industry organizations themselves. In my view, that leads to our placing more focus on how to manage the diversion of food waste rather than how to reduce it at source. Unless we reduce it at source, we're never going to be able to achieve the outcomes we otherwise could.
We look around the world, and Canada does trail compared to jurisdictions such as the U.K. and Australia, and compared to a number of initiatives in, say, the U.S. and Europe. We have a lack of a coordinated policy framework and a lack of strategy. Most of what occurs is from businesses doing it off their own back versus being incentivized or encouraged to do so more proactively. That has occurred, for instance, in the U.K. with WRAP, the waste reduction action plan. Many people see the public face of WRAP as one instance. Yet what occurs behind the scenes of WRAP is the most valuable part of the entire program.
We should also not forget that WRAP did not begin in food. It's only moved to food in recent years, while there was increasing recognition in the U.K. industry that food was an issue. Food and environmental responsibility was a key issue for the industry as a whole.
Hopefully today we'll certainly touch on my perspective of where we can go forward, and what the opportunities and the strategies can be, and hopefully move Canada to be more at the forefront of what is occurring elsewhere.
Thank you.