Agriculture committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'll keep to my five minutes or less. The issue around GMO, I think, can be extended to any new technologies that face the food industry. We're seeing this with nanotechnology now, and some of the same kinds of debates that we saw with the GMO issue are ari

Agriculture committee  Thank you, Mr. Valeriote. On the whole question of whether we can have an absolute zero and ensure absolute safety, I would be remiss if I were to say yes. No one can ever guarantee absolute safety, but with the current science, as Dr. Ellis has indicated, there are new technolo

Agriculture committee  Further to those discussions, I think the fact that you can possibly reduce the acreage of the crops you're growing because you get less damage to those crops would be an advantage, so as I was indicating, the carbon footprint would be an advantage. I think the whole issue arou

Agriculture committee  Mr. Easter, I think the issue around trust or mistrust is really an issue of understanding and for us to do a better job as scientists to educate the public and the consumer about what we do as scientists, so that they have a better idea of the kinds of studies that are being und

Agriculture committee  Thank you. As my colleague has indicated, Health Canada is responsible for setting up the criteria, the company will then supply the data, and then Health Canada will do the assessment. I'll turn it over to my colleague Dr. Ellis.

Agriculture committee  I think the challenges we face are population growth, water shortage, and energy crises. GMOs could be part of that solution. And Dr. Ellis, being a plant scientist, could probably comment on this. There is a tremendous amount of work being done on salt-tolerant plants, drought-t

Agriculture committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Once again, thank you to the committee for the invitation to come before you. I'll take a little bit of a different tack from my colleagues with regard to biotechnology. I'll talk about biotechnology in the context of food. Undoubtedly, some of the early

Agriculture committee  Thank you, Mr. Valeriote. AFMNet brings many contributions to this country of Canada. I'll start off with the human capital aspect. Presently we train 179 HQP, or highly qualified personnel. They range from undergraduates to post-doctoral fellows. So we train a number of people,

Agriculture committee  Thank you, Mr. Bellavance. I was at meeting last week in Washington with the United States Department of Agriculture on some of their projects. One of the projects they were looking at was nanocrystalline cellulose. We're also doing some research in that area, particularly in Al

Agriculture committee  Correct.

Agriculture committee  Thank you, Mr. Easter. You're correct that AFMNet received $5.6 million a year. We acted as a granting council for Canadian researchers in the agrifood sector, also in the social sciences and humanities sector in relation to food. As I indicated in my presentation, what this fu

Agriculture committee  Well, unless we find other sources of funding, I would say that those projects will cease to exist. Again, the infrastructure that's been built up will erode very quickly without funding.

Agriculture committee  Well, the coordination will probably dissipate because there are no moneys to support the networking. The other thing that researchers will end up doing is they'll gravitate towards other funding envelopes, which may or may not be in their core area of expertise. So again, we'l

Agriculture committee  Yes, we acknowledge that there is a peer review system.

Agriculture committee  I'm probably the least qualified to answer that question, but in the eyes of a food scientist, it would be the use of a biological system to produce a product. Now, that process may be through genetic manipulation of a product, through genetic engineering, or it may be through