Agriculture committee  Thank you very much. I'd like to thank you, on behalf of the Canadian Seed Trade Association, for the opportunity to make our comments today on this issue. We would like to limit our comments to KVD, or kernel visual distinguishability, rather than the whole COMPAS report. My

Agriculture committee  Thank you very much. That's really a critical question, moving forward. If we look to the bigger picture internationally, it's my understanding, based on my experience in the industry, that Canada is the only place that depends on this type of KVD system. Obviously there are ex

Agriculture committee  Essentially, our organizations do not get involved at all on the grain side of the business. Our main concern is with providing a high-quality, pure product going into the production process. On behalf of the seed trade or SeCan, that's not an area we would get involved in or hav

Agriculture committee  Thanks for your question. With regard to the difference between Ontario and western Canada and the opportunities we see, essentially what's being proposed in eliminating KVD from the minor classes means that the minor classes of wheat can look like each other, but they all stil

Agriculture committee  Again, our comments here today were really just of a technical nature with respect to the KVD issue.

Agriculture committee  We believe that ultimately the impact will be that there will be more choice in terms of what farmers in western Canada can grow. Again, we feel that we're just on the verge now of having a bit of a revolution in western Canada with respect to the end use for the products and tha

Agriculture committee  I'd just like to echo some of those comments. Like everyone, I think, in the seed industry, the Canadian Seed Trade Association is very supportive of a science-based regulatory system. To build on that, though--and to answer your question--we can't predict what is going to be a

Agriculture committee  Certainly we would have members of the seed trade probably on both sides of that issue. We don't have an official position on it. First and foremost, we feel it's our job to provide top-quality seed to growers regardless of how they choose to market their crop.

Agriculture committee  Sorry, the $200 million was from another third party study, which we could provide, and I'm not sure that was included actually in the COMPAS study.

Agriculture committee  Certainly. With respect to the number and why we feel it could be underestimated, I think it's because for many decades plant breeders have been forced to essentially cross within a fairly narrow gene pool in order to meet the requirements of KVD. The effects of that over years

Agriculture committee  Likely it's because for red wheat the western system was evolved a long time ago, and it's something that just hasn't changed. I believe we've been operating under a very similar model for something like 70 years. We had a situation in the late eighties in Ontario where the deci

Agriculture committee  I'm not familiar with the specific case you're referring to. I guess, in general, we feel that Canada needs to be competitive in terms of the intellectual property tools we provide, to the extent that we encourage innovation to happen here in Canada. We also believe that farmers

Agriculture committee  If we look at what's happening with other crops, we can see that the marketplace rapidly sorts out what the optimal number of crop types or varieties needs to be. There are many examples of this across Canada. Even within an organized market like the Canadian Wheat Board, where t

Agriculture committee  Again, it's hard to predict the free market. Probably the best we can do is look at real life examples where we do have an open market--for example, in soybeans. What we see is that the majority of the commodity will gravitate towards one or two more profitable options, be those

Agriculture committee  A significant purchaser of top-quality Canadian wheat right now is a firm in the U.K. by the name of Warburtons, which is actually going beyond the services that are offered traditionally by the Canadian Wheat Board or the Canadian Grain Commission to do their own identity preser