Hello, everyone.
My name is Robert Saik. I'm beaming in to you from San Sebastián, Spain. I echo the comments made by my colleague from Richardson grains.
I'm speaking here in Spain on the resiliency of agriculture globally. My background is that of professional agrologist. I've written two books on the subject of food production and technology integration. My heritage is 100% Ukrainian. Both sets of grandparents emigrated from Ukraine. I'm actively on the ground in Ukraine right now, even today. I've been playing a role in getting supplies to the people on the ground in Ukraine.
My concern from a standpoint of Canadian resiliency is that far too often we see ideology driving the agenda with respect to agriculture. “Farm to Fork” was already mentioned here. The objectives in the EU under Farm to Fork are a blanket 50% reduction in pesticides, a 50% reduction in antibiotics for animals and that 25% of the European Union would be organics production.
It's common knowledge—not rocket science—that organic production creates a drag on yield, so you have to put more land into production. We have to be very cautious about ideology driving agriculture policy. Agriculture decisions should be output based. No better example of poor policy is in the news today than Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka's policy to go 100% organic last April has been a disaster. It was the first domino in pushing that country to basically political and financial ruin.
What we need in Canada right now is close collaboration with those policy-makers to understand that agriculture must be output based and that the keys to sustainability in agriculture are soil health—so we need to concentrate on soil health—water use efficiency and greenhouse gas balance.
When I speak of “balance” in greenhouse gas, it's not a blanket reduction in 30% of nitrogen fertilizer across Canada. That's not the answer. It's a recognition by policy-makers of the technologies that are adopted by agricultural producers in Canada, including slow-release nitrogen fertilizers, variable rate application of fertilizer, split application of fertilizers, and soil testing, all the sciences that go into making Canadian farmers some of the most efficient farmers in the world, albeit we still have room to improve, but our nitrogen use efficiency in Canada is amongst the highest in the world.
We need to produce more. The world needs more Canada. It needs more canola. It needs more wheat. We've just been I think blessed with a good ruling on the recognition that genetic engineering, or gene editing, is sound science. That needs to be moved further and faster around the world.
I'll stop there. I'm looking forward to questions from the panel pertaining to agriculture food production and resilience from Canadian farmers.