Agriculture committee  No. It's approved, so if it goes to the point where a commercialized alfalfa is registered then it can be used.

Agriculture committee  GM alfalfa is approved, just not the specific commercial type.

Agriculture committee  Yes. It's ready to go.

Agriculture committee  Agreed. But even on the LLP, when we asked if there had been any incidents in Canada that would qualify for LLP we were told last week there had been none. Right now we have a pretty good record in Canada.

Agriculture committee  Yes, we're different. That's one of our primary issues. Especially with so many new entrants, profitability is absolutely essential and is one of the main things many of our organizations are focusing on. With cost-of-production tools we actually have a business transition path

Agriculture committee  That's right, on corn. Yes, sure.

Agriculture committee  We have. We actually had a presentation at the Organic Value Chain Roundtable last week. As I'm sure you can imagine, the organic sector is very unsupportive of this. One thing I want to raise, and I don't even know that the canola growers realize it, is that it's not about jus

Agriculture committee  Yes, a study was done in the United States by the American Bakers Association, because they're quite concerned over ethanol-based corn, point blank. So they were reducing it, saying even if it's not intended for human consumption, that cross-contamination has significant detrimen

Agriculture committee  Absolutely not. I feel as though there is value to different scales in production models. That's why community-supported agriculture models are doing so well in Canada. Then maybe the surplus of exports can go to that international market. At the heart of it, we still believe th

Agriculture committee  No, not today; right now, with over 4,000 producers—and 40% of those are in the prairies—this is business, it's economics, and it is science. The only way we're really seeing a lot of people transition into organic is that the science is there and they're fed up with some of thos

Agriculture committee  Actually, we're doing very well at this point. The national Canadian organic regulations were passed and finalized this year after a two-year implementation, and that resulted in those bilateral trade agreements with the EU and U.S. That means that any product coming into Canada

Agriculture committee  One of the things that we can continue to do is invest in the organic science cluster. That's been going very well. That's managed through the Organic Agriculture Centre of Canada, in which the federal contribution was over $6 million, and industry's has been $2.2 million. If we

Agriculture committee  We do need to continue to invest in those standards.

Agriculture committee  I think a lot of it has to come down between the federal and provincial agreements. Obviously farmers are accessing funds within their own province, and what we've found is that there's a discrepancy among the provinces in how they've interpreted Growing Forward 2. Even in terms

Agriculture committee  Of course that is something that our entire sector is very actively pursuing. Last year your bill failed to evaluate the economic impact that GM would have—on all sectors: you don't have to be organic to be affected by GM contamination in potential markets. Certainly alfalfa is,