Agriculture committee  Sure. Starting out with the fusarium one, about five years ago, when this became.... Well, it's been an issue for a long time. It started out in corn, and now it's more in other cereals that we're seeing the issue. A number of years ago when this became a really big issue, we act

Agriculture committee  You would, and seed produced in Alberta in those areas...so if you produced seed in that lower zone area and it had higher than that level, you'd still have to take it out of the province and probably sell it as grain.

Agriculture committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and committee members, for giving me the opportunity to offer the seed industry's perspective on barriers to domestic trade. As Mr. Shipley said, my name is Patty Townsend, and I'm the CEO of the Canadian Seed Trade Association, or CSTA. The

Agriculture committee  Sure. As we've been moving through and talking to farmers and seed companies, there was one concern and we agree that maybe there's a lack of clarity around the use of the term “stocking”. When we talk about stocking, we think about stocking grocery store shelves for sale, and

Agriculture committee  Sure. As I said, about 53% of our members are what we call independent seedsmen who are small farmer-grower retailers. They hold the balance of the votes in our organization. If you go up to the big multinationals, there are five, maybe six of them; I might have been wrong when I

Agriculture committee  Yes.

Agriculture committee  CSTA doesn't do anything unless our members support it. We operate on a consensus basis, and we've had strong direction throughout the last 22 years to advocate for this.

Agriculture committee  Sure. We have five multinational company members of CSTA, so that's five of the 130. Fifty-three per cent of our votes are small independent seed grower retailers and the remaining are those in the middle. I would consider Archie and Erin to be in the middle.

Agriculture committee  For more than 22 years this has been a high priority, a top priority for all of our members. We even have members that are part of public breeding programs at universities that realize this is an extremely important piece of legislation and amendments to plant breeders' rights, b

Agriculture committee  We do have members in the organic sector. Most of them are in forage and grass seeds and there is not a lot of investment in plant breeding in forages and grasses right now. There are a lot of problems that aren't just plant breeders' rights problems, but anything that can give t

Agriculture committee  As you know, as the private sector, we need to generate a return on the investments that we make in plant breeding and research. The only crops right now where we can generate that return are those that have other intellectual property tools available to them, like contracts, hyb

Agriculture committee  Yes, Bill C-18 will give the breeders additional tools to protect their intellectual property and allow them to recover more of their investment.

Agriculture committee  I'll start off. If I speak too quickly, interpreters, please wave your arms at me, because I have been accused of doing that before. I have only two minutes, so you have to listen fast. We're sharing our time with two of our members, C&M Seeds and Canterra Seeds. I would

Agriculture committee  Sure. I can give you some examples from some of our member companies. For example, Syngenta has hired a wheat breeder, and Bayer has substantially increased their production. One of the things they said to us before some of these regulatory changes happened, which I'll get into

Agriculture committee  One of the changes that was made last February, actually, was an expansion of that new milling class that we call Canada's opportunity class. It does allow for the development of varieties that are closer to the U.S. dark northern springs, for example, or some of the harder sprin