Thank you very much.
Members of the committee, parliamentarians, staff, and guests, we want to thank you for this opportunity to speak to you about biodiversity as a key strategy for climate resilience as well as a best management practice for the stewardship of our soil and water resources. I particularly want to speak to it as modelled by some of our work at USC Canada.
I am pleased to be here with Geneviève Grossenbacher, our program manager for policy and campaigns at USC Canada, who is herself an ecological farmer based just north of Ottawa.
USC Canada is a Canadian success story. You may know of us. We were founded by Lotta Hitschmanova as the Unitarian Service Committee back in 1945. We’ve inspired generations of Canadians to contribute to issues of global concern. Our work on agricultural biodiversity overseas has in part been funded by Global Affairs Canada since the early 1990s. Our work with Canadian farmers is much more recent. It was launched in 2011 and is funded by The W. Garfield Weston Foundation and by donations from individual Canadians.
We’re here primarily to ask the Government of Canada to support programs that conserve and enhance on-farm agricultural biodiversity. That biodiversity is our most precious resource, and it provides the best insurance policy for managing the uncertainty and risk presented by our changing climate.
I am an accountant by training. In finance and investment, we are advised to maintain diversified portfolios. Diversified portfolios reduce risk, and they ultimately lead to the most consistent long-term success. That same principle holds true in agriculture. Biodiversity simply provides for resilience.
This is actually the nature of genetics. Seeds are tiny packets of potential. They contain some traits that we can see, but others, such as the ability to survive drought or the resistance to pests or disease, appear only when a plant experiences stress. The more biodiversity we keep in our seed supply, the more likely it is that our crops will have the traits they need for a wide range of conditions. But biodiversity is not static. Selecting the best seeds, saving them, and replanting them the following year keeps those crops evolving and adapting as the conditions change around them. The more diversity of seeds farmers can access and the more diverse traits these seeds have, the better Canada's food supply can adapt to climate stresses.
A broad range of plant genetics can ensure that crops yield good harvests even in challenging conditions, but biodiversity in and of itself is not enough. As we think about our agricultural methods, we must also pay attention to the health of the soil ecology and water systems that are quite literally at agriculture's roots.
Evidence is growing that the integration of biodiversity practices within ecological agricultural systems provides significant benefits to the health of water and soil. The IAASTD—if you don't know that acronym, you can ask Gen to explain it later—report from 2008 was one of the first broad reviews of scientific literature that came to that conclusion. More recently, the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, IPES-Food, published a report entitled “From Uniformity to Diversity”, which references many studies that provide a comprehensive argument for farms of all scales to employ biodiverse ecological techniques. The benefits of such an approach include: strong potential for carbon sequestration; increased diversity and quantity of beneficial microbiotic organisms in the soil; improved water absorption and retention; decreased runoff and contamination of surface and groundwater; and increased species diversity of plants, insects, and birds in surrounding ecosystems.
The authors of the IPES-Food study describe a virtuous, positive feedback loop created within biodiverse ecological agriculture and leading to continued improvements in soil fertility, productivity, and ecosystem health, while providing secondary benefits to communities downstream. These improvements and benefits all lend themselves to supporting the adaptive resilience of our food production, farmers, and rural communities as we move into this era of climate change.
This is a unique moment. Yesterday COP23 opened, reminding us of the significant climate commitments Canada has made as part of the Paris climate agreement. The launch of the new Canadian agricultural partnership and the development of a food policy for Canada presents an opportunity for Canada to launch programs that incentivize agricultural innovation toward addressing climate change. We must seize this opportunity to support on-farm biodiversity.
USC Canada's Canadian field program, the Bauta Family Initiative for Canadian Seed Security, is a model for how Canadian farmers can work together to adapt to the impacts of climate change. Through participatory plant breeding, farmers are developing new seed varieties that are locally adapted and perform well in low-input conditions. This low-cost approach to genetic innovation can have a significant impact. For example, in partnership with the University of Manitoba over just the last five years, farmers in our program have been developing wheat varieties selected for their heterogeneity and their performance in low-input environments which, when tested against conventional varieties, show greater early vigour, better disease resistance, and greater concentration of micronutrients, all the while being competitive on yields in both drought and flood years.
To gain the benefits of biodiverse agriculture, research and investment cannot be focused on single traits within limited varieties of a very few crops. Innovation and adaptation must happen across the breadth of crops used in agriculture. Participatory plant breeding, putting the leadership for crop diversification back into the hands of farmers, ensures that the scope of breeding work encompasses many more varieties and allows for innovations to adapt to the specific local context. The 184 farmers engaged in our participatory plant breeding program have adapted over 400 different varieties to local growing conditions, ranging from Vancouver Island to Cape Breton and Newfoundland, and to the extreme north in Alberta. The process is replicable and scalable, and does not require huge financial resources. It can, however, have enormous impact by keeping diversity alive and adapting to new conditions, and creating new diversity through innovative farmer-research partnerships.
USC Canada has been working with farmers in marginal environments around the world for more than three decades. We know that many of the challenges of agricultural practices, soil erosion and degradation, high levels of water consumption, contamination, declining input efficiency, and even financial vulnerability, all of these can be mitigated by embracing biodiversity and supporting ecological practices. To this end, the Government of Canada should support programs that conserve and enhance on-farm agricultural biodiversity and, more specifically, invest in systems of knowledge development and transfer, like participatory plant breeding, to continue expanding agricultural best practices and to develop new varieties of climate-resilient crops.
USC Canada has been innovating on the ground with farmers and researchers for many years. Our experience substantiates expert findings that biodiversity and ecological practices are essential to feed communities today, and to protect the soil and water resources we need to feed future generations. We hope your findings will contribute to creating an enabling policy environment to support our work and those of others in our field, to make Canada a world leader in on-farm research for food security and climate adaptation.
Thank you very much.