Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Minister, for being here. I very much appreciate it and all the witnesses who we're going to be talking to today.
I wanted to talk about food loss prevention. About a third of the food grown at present here is wasted. About $49 billion a year is Canada's portion. Much of the focus right now is on diverting food waste. Right now, programs are emphasizing organic waste management, so that organic waste does not end up in landfills, where it generates methane gas during decomposition.
The best way to reduce the numbers is to keep the food in the food chain in the first place, by focusing on food loss prevention rather than these more efficient ways of destroying or modifying food waste. We know that prevention creates the greatest economic social and environmental benefits. Once you reduce food loss at any point in the chain, you're automatically saving it all the way back up the chain. If we're wasting a third of the food we grow, we're automatically wasting a third of the fertilizer, a third of the fuel and a third of the land that it took to grow it.
Minister, can you share with us some of the programs and the solutions that we have and would like to implement to combat food waste?