Absolutely.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to the committee for this fantastic opportunity to testify on this very important subject. I understand this is your last hearing. Hopefully we can help out at the very last day and get you on the road with some great suggestions.
I thought I might start by introducing BIOTECanada, not because I think we as an organization are particularly interesting but I want to focus on our membership. We have 250 member companies. They are across the country and they occupy a number of important baskets or buckets.
We have a large health care component. That's the area where you would see large multinational pharmaceutical companies, but also a lot of small companies that are developing new drugs, medicines and therapies to keep people healthy. We also have in our membership industrial, agricultural and environmental biotech companies. They are also right across the country, usually in clusters spread out in the different provinces. Each province focuses or has a specialty. The companies are usually around universities or research institutes, as you would expect.
What are they doing? They're doing biotechnology, which is essentially taking living organisms and turning them into useful things. The earliest form of biotechnology are things that are near and dear to most of our hearts—beer, wine and bread—but we've come a long way since then. They are developing biotechnology solutions for the world, and I think the key here is to understand what the challenge is that they're addressing.
When you look at the world we see a global population growth. We expect to be somewhere in the nine billion person area probably within the next 30 to 40 years, maybe even more, maybe 10 billion. That brings with it some enormous challenges, not the least of which is how we feed all of those people on a landmass that is shifting on us, in the sense that some land is becoming less available and some land is becoming more available. Part of the reason for that is the climate is changing.
Why is the climate changing? We know that with the global population growth along comes a massive economic growth, particularly in countries like China and India, where you see those economies really taking stride and ramping up. With that economic growth comes the burgeoning middle class, which spends more money and demands more consumer goods, and that proliferates the economic growth.
That kind of economic growth puts enormous pressure on the planet as well, as factories manufacture more goods and more people waste. We have to find ways to address those challenges. We cannot keep living the way we have. We have to change fundamentally how we manufacture, how we grow, how we live our lives. Ultimately, the planet is going to be just fine, as the dinosaurs can attest. It is us that are in danger. We have to find a way to save ourselves and biotechnology is the solution that's going to help get us there. That seems like a daunting challenge and, of course, it is and we must address it.
It's also an enormous economic opportunity for a country like Canada. In the agricultural space, when you look at our history, we are in a really fantastic space to bring forward amazing solutions for this global challenge. We have a lot of companies in this country that are building on that history of innovation and also our agricultural heritage and developing some fantastic solutions.
I'm going to use two to illustrate the point because I think it's the most effective way. One is a company called Agrisoma. Agrisoma takes a genetically modified mustard seed or a version of a mustard seed. That seed can be grown anywhere you cannot grow other plants. You can grow it in fallow fields. You can grow it in places where there's not enough nutrients in the soil, where there's not enough sunlight, not enough moisture, so that spreads out exactly where you can put this thing.
Once you've grown the seed, the seed is crushed and you extract the oil. The oil is processed into jet fuel. There is no fossil fuel in the mix. The jet fuel can go straight into a jet engine and the plane will fly. There's the NRC plane. Many of you as you've gone out to the Ottawa airport have seen there's a little hangar off to the right as you pull into the airport. There's a little jet in there and there's also a sniffer plane. They've flown the jet with the fuel. You don't have to alter the jet engine in any way. They send a sniffer plane behind it and because there's no fossil fuel in the mix there are no emissions.
It's a fantastic story that gets even better. If I go back to that seed I told you about, once you crush it there is meal that's left over afterwards. That meal then gets put back into the food chain. It's used for protein to feed cattle and other animals.
It's a wonderful life cycle. You use the whole product. It's put into fields, and so farmers, if they have a field in fallow, can use it to put nutrients back into the soil while growing the seed, and it provides an income. Obviously, from a transportation and from an environmental standpoint there's a fantastic benefit, and then it goes back into the food chain. That's a great example I think, but as you hear that story you can start to understand all the different parts of government that have oversight from a regulatory standpoint.
You have transport, environment, agriculture, and at the very end you have Health Canada through the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, which takes care of the genetically modified meal that's going back into the food chain.
The other example I'm going to leave you with is a company called Okanagan Specialty Fruits, out in the Okanagan Valley. It figured out a way to stop apples from turning brown. I'm the father of a 12-year-old and I would like him to eat apples, but he won't take any apples to school because the minute they're cut at home, they turn brown. Kids don't eat them. You can't put them in fruit salads at school, and sometimes you can't give them to kids because they don't want to eat brown apples. Thousands if not millions of pounds of apples are basically discarded every year because they get bruised and turn brown. This is a way to stop food waste.
Like you, when I first heard this story I wondered if this was really all about just stopping an apple from going brown. I got the idea that this may not be the ultimate goal, and it's not. If you look at that company, the other thing these scientists and orchardists discovered is a way to stop something called “fire blight”. Fire blight is a fungus that will rip through an entire orchard and destroy it if not controlled. Using the same sort of technology, they have figured out how to stop that, and that's what they're working on. It's a step change. You develop certain things and you improve on what you've already discovered and use that for further discovery.
When we think back to the challenge we're facing as a civilization in having to deal with the global population and the need to be more efficient and effective in how we grow, manufacture and live our lives, these are the types of solutions that are going to help us get there. We have a fantastic history of doing it through innovation in our agricultural departments. We also have a great amount of support from government. As you've probably heard, there are a number of programs that have been enormously supportive. The most recent large one is the protein industries supercluster, which is going to develop a lot of fantastic innovation out of the Prairies. It's a great development. It's an exciting industry, and it's a great opportunity for Canada to be at the forefront and be a leader in solving some of these problems.
I will leave it at that, Mr. Chair. I thank you very much and look forward to the questions.