Canola and agriculture have a really positive story to tell when it comes to environmental policy and the intersection of agricultural and environmental policy. It's really important, going forward, that there be an understanding, when environmental policy is being crafted, of how agriculture works, so that the policy can be implemented on-farm.
China's closure to the two largest grain handlers has certainly been a huge hit on the industry. We had really strong commodity prices in 2020, which has helped buoy it. Domestic demand for canola for biofuels has certainly helped with this.
When it comes to competitiveness, I think it's important to note that carbon pricing is typically designed to disincentivize certain behaviours. When it comes to primary agriculture in western Canada, there has been a lot of talk about electrification, but there simply is not the infrastructure in western Canada to run a grain dryer, for example. You can't reach the BTUs in Alberta using electricity; you have to use propane and natural gas. If farmers could use more electricity, they would, because it's cheaper than propane and natural gas.
I think it's just understanding the realities on-farm and that we've relied on farmers throughout the pandemic, both from a food security perspective and an export perspective.
Going forward, to address the second part of your question, canola has specific targets, but in agriculture we don't want to break more land; we don't want to put more land into production. What we're trying to do is intensification to get more production per acre—higher yield, less disease, less damage from weather. The way we're going to do that is through new plant breeding innovations, such as gene editing.
The concern we have now is that we're going to achieve those new yields through using technology such as gene editing, but Canada's regulatory environment is one that's not incentivizing small, medium-sized or even global players to invest in plant breeding here.
There have been two examples of Canadian innovations developed in Canada, tested and trialed in Canada and commercialized in the United States because there is a clear path to market.