Agriculture committee  Because internationally, every single organic certification system prohibits the use of GMOs in their production system. You can't get fertilizer drift, and in terms of pesticide and herbicide use, organic producers have a buffer that they need to be responsible for on their land

Agriculture committee  Because I've got data from the GE alfalfa trials in the United States that show 11 of 15 plots were contaminated, despite the 900-metre buffer being obeyed, and some of those plots were two and a half kilometres away. So we set limits for drift, but then nature does what she does

Agriculture committee  That's what I have off the top of my head.

Agriculture committee  What we have with the soybean situation, for example, is that they've created their own segregated shipping systems, so you're not going to run into a situation such as we did with flax, where the contamination may have happened in the value chain and not in the field. Where in

Agriculture committee  But in the IP market, like we heard, Japan's tolerance is 5% and in the EU it's zero. So if your organic crop is going to Europe and there's adventitious presence, you've lost your market.

Agriculture committee  They're certainly running into issues with feed availability.

Agriculture committee  I'm only speaking on behalf of the consumer base, which drove the creation of our industry and who say they don't want to eat genetically modified foods. Will there be a need to work with some level of tolerance? Likely so. Our sector hasn't reached consensus on that. The minute

Agriculture committee  I'm not in a position yet to speak on behalf of the sector on that, because again, as I said, we're still trying to iron some of that out. I think there is a willingness to be certain that our organic producers do not lose markets because of adventitious presence. I think one of

Agriculture committee  No, but the government is there to regulate. If allowing a product into the market means that you take away choice in another area in the economy that's viable, that becomes an issue. We could argue back and forth for a long time, and as I said, our sector hasn't resolved this.

Agriculture committee  Absolutely.

Agriculture committee  I just want to quickly add to that. Our biggest fear is that our consumers are right, and there are issues with GMOs that the current regulatory regime has overlooked, and we're ten years further down the road with additional commercialization so that we can't pull back from the

Agriculture committee  In fact, right now we have the non-GMO project, which is a joint U.S. and Canada labelling regime. It's not necessarily tied to organics, but it is a verification system that has an audit trail associated with it. It has an adventitious level.

Agriculture committee  We've seen that one of our major players in Canada, Nature's Path, has gotten behind the non-GMO project and has begun labelling some of their products that are for sale in Canada.

Agriculture committee  Quickly, the issue of choice also comes down to when one sector's choice impedes the other sector in making the choice they want to make. I use the example of flax again. Had that been a commercialization and a drift happened, the organic sector would lose its choice to produce o

Agriculture committee  I think in ten years we're going to see dwindling supplies of oil, which is the basis of our conventional agriculture. Our synthetic pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers are derived that way, and our food is shipped that way. Depending on how quickly the price spike in oil hap