:
Let me make four or five key points. The first is that science, technology, and innovation is, has been, and should be a critical part of federal policy. I think over the last 20 to 30 years there's been a diminution of its role in driving policy options and policy solutions. So I applaud you for focusing in on science and innovation as a critical part of the GF 2.
Secondly, just to remind you where I come from, I'm a professor of public policy. I study innovation as it relates to the agrifood system. So much of what I'm going to talk about, I write about and publish on a regular basis. So if anything tweaks your interest, you can find background information.
The third thing is I think it's important when we talk about innovation in the agrifood system in Canada that we keep two realities in mind. The first is that while we perceive your competition to be Chinese and Brazilian and American farmers, more fundamentally, your competition in terms of accessing land, labour, and capital to keep the industry vibrant and growing in Canada is other sectors in the Canadian economy. So it's not only important to be price competitive with other exporters, it's important that the sector be able to generate enough wealth from its use of its resources to sustain that use of those resources in this sector. Right now there are major parts of the Canadian agrifood industry that don't generate enough value to sustain the ongoing use of the land, labour, and capital, especially the mobile labour and the mobile capital.
The second point is that much of what we're talking about is fenced around by distorted policies around the world. So as we think about science and innovation, we're fundamentally going to have to worry about where it fits in the context of international trade. One of the impacts of that is that pretty much universally around the world we're not investing enough in the basic and applied sciences in the agrifood world.
The simplest test of that is that the return on investment for directed agrifood investment is running around 50% to 70%. We'd all love to get 50% ROI from our investments, but much of that is dispersed among a large group of people, so to have the ability to actually extract that and pay for the investment is very difficult.
The Canadian government has accepted innovation as a critical part of the Canadian economy's future, but if there's a problem, it's that agriculture, for some reason, either by choice or by chance, seems to have been partially carved out of that vision. Many of the things that are relevant to agriculture--the programs, the services, the investment pools--are not eligible for R and D and basic science research in the agrifood area, and that's a major concern. So the Canadian government is in the right space, but the agrifood policy area in many ways has been carved out.
As you go through your review, you're probably going to get a lot of advice, free or otherwise, about where Canada should put its resources. I often suggest to anybody who thinks about innovation policy to think about four Ps.
The traditional economists will say all we need to do is get the prices right, and the government's role should be pretty minimalist--don't do any intervention, just make sure the prices are right so that you get rid of all kinds of perceived distortions in the marketplace. That is an important element to it, but that's the base. Correct prices will bring forward investment, but not necessarily investment that will keep this industry viable.
There are three other Ps that really matter. There's place. Most of the really interesting innovation that comes out of the agrifood world and virtually every other sector is in agglomerations of research communities, users, consumers. So it's the cluster model. Place is a critical part, but place isn't enough anymore.
The second part is processes, innovation systems. There are natural flows of information that are important to converting basic science into applied science, into application and use. We have some very good examples in Canada and very good networks between Canada and the world that bring much of that technology into the Canadian context and use it for industrial purposes.
The fourth P that a lot of people talk about is creativity--the creatives, the people who make it happen. So it's not just about place, it's not just about getting the macro prices right, it's not just about getting a whole bunch of institutions in place. It's about attracting and retaining and mobilizing and enabling the scientists and scholars and entrepreneurs to actually do what they do best, which is bring new things to use.
I think you're going to be posed with policies right across that piece. I think those four Ps help, in a way, to define what kinds of policy options may make some sense in the broad area of agrifood research.
In the first instance, there probably needs to be less pulling away from basic and early applied research by the federal system. There has been a pullback, and that is partly what the Jenkins report and some of the advice coming from STIC are about. Right now we are very passive in the way we assist firms and industries to invest in development and innovation. There's a lot more federal capacity--be it through the Ag Canada research centres or the National Research Council institutes--where the federal government could be a critical player.
There are three or four elements about the federal investments that I want to quickly touch on.
When we last talked I laid out some of my concerns about the changes in the way Ag Canada and some federal programming had been operating that had been sort of cutting out agriculture as a priority area. There has been an additional change to that, in that the National Research Council is now talking about substantially changing the way it operates institutes.
I can speak with a fairly high degree of confidence that many of the important innovations in the agrifood world, for which Canada was ground zero, were inextricably linked to the capacity and the mobilization of knowledge from the NRC, particularly PBI in Saskatoon, and others. If the institutes die or change into downstream, project-based ventures, I think you're going to lose some very important strategic actors in the system.
Federal research effort is pretty diffuse, not only through the undirected grants, but even at the operational level in the intramural research between departments and agencies. It doesn't get together very well. Even within the same department across different divisions or sectors, they have difficulty working together. I think that's a shame in a country this small with this need for science in its industry.
Second, we're becoming too short term. We're moving from seven- to 10-year planning horizons to one- to two-year planning horizons. Our main competitor in many of our product lines is Australia. They took the lessons we showed them in the centres of excellence program and embedded them system-wide in the agrifood system through the GRDC. I think we should be re-examining our horizons there.
Third, there's the real challenge that we tend to spread our capital too thinly. We want to do something in every community. There are natural agglomerations. They are natural places where things happen. You don't have to choose them. The industry and the commodity groups have chosen them for you, so you just need to support and assist them. The artificial pulling apart of capacity is a dangerous policy area, and there are some opportunities there.
Another area I talked about before and won't belabour is that intellectual property is a critical part of the future of agrifood: brands, patents, and plant breeders' rights. We have most of the bits there, but we could do more. The one big concern I have is that once we have things that have intellectual property value, we have great difficulty in partnerships within the public domain. I had a student look at a recent partnership in Saskatoon that comprised public institutions using public funds. They had over 150 pieces of intellectual property, but they couldn't come to an agreement to pool them and exploit them as a common resource. That's a major failing of a governing system.
The final point I want to make is about regulation and governance. If the Canadian agrifood industry is going to thrive in the 21st century, it will have to differentiate and exploit value wherever it is. That means we'll have supply chains for commodities and products that are GM or GM-free, organic, and halal. They'll have unique functional attributes, and we don't have regulatory and supply chain systems in place to currently handle them.
The conference I'm now at in Vancouver is an international conference of regulators and industrial people from pretty much across the agrifood system around the world, and we're all facing the same problem. Canada can and should be a leader in that policy debate, and I will give you a symptom of the challenge.
It was next to impossible to get some of the key informants and leaders in the Canadian regulatory system to engage in the dialogue in Vancouver. I had no problem getting the Europeans, the Brazilians, the Australians, or the Americans to turn up, but the Canadians just didn't turn up. They all got their marching orders on Monday this week. We've been planning this conference and talking to them for over a year.
So here's an opportunity right in our backyard, where we could have taken a leadership role in defining the debate about how the system will differentiate products and sustain value in all these competitive but parallel supply chains.
In conclusion, I think you have a really important topic here. Innovation is the future of agriculture. It's not about divvying up the profits and trying to maintain markets. It's about trying to make, create, and innovate within a whole variety of technology and product market categories.
I thank you for inviting me, and I'll pass it over to my colleague.
:
Fair enough. Thanks for that.
The point I'd like to link to innovation, though, is that we need to develop a broad range of policy platforms in order to prepare for what many business experts and scientists are describing as an extraordinary crisis that seems to be unfolding. There are a number of places around the world that are struggling with food crises. I think Canadian agricultural policy has a strong role to play in addressing this global crisis, which cuts through our Canadian system as well.
I'd like to direct my attention to four broad areas. The first broad strategy, which gets discussed at a range of fora, including business and scientific groups at the grassroots level, is that we need to be investing in science and technology to boost productivity.
Europe has tripled productivity over the last 50 years. Other data show how productivity and investment in Africa have resulted in 1,000 kilograms of grain per hectare over the last 50 years. We see that the green revolution has worked extraordinarily well in some parts of the world but not in others.
This applies to Canada as well. When I was working in the U.K., the Department for International Development, DFID, and the DEFRA, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, were working together to develop science and innovation platforms that drew on western academic expertise to address global food security.
If you have the opportunity to think broadly and at a global scale about the Growing Forward 2 program, I would encourage you to look for opportunities to develop new partnerships that might result in new technologies capable of being applied at the grassroots level in different parts of the world.
There's a strong argument throughout the literature that we need more research and innovation to further government regulation for environmental management. This cuts through all the debates that I've been part of. We get a strong sense of this when we start looking at things like nutrient run-offs from the livestock industry. We need a strong government mandate to develop tougher environmental regulations.
The third type of strategy related to the global food crisis is that we need to develop technologies to store food better. This is an extraordinarily important point that has social policy, engineering, and technical aspects to it. We need better technologies to store food. We also need to understand the scale at which we need to store food.
I wanted to highlight the importance of storing food in ancient societies and to link that to agricultural policy. There is the biblical story of Pharaoh's dream, where Pharaoh dreams of seven good years followed by seven bad years. The public policy advice Pharaoh adopted was to develop infrastructure and store food. We don't do that anywhere near enough. I think the world has forgotten this lesson—it's embarked on a just-in-time food system. For six years we've eaten at a global scale more than we have produced. This is a mistake.
The latest United Nations report on the global food crisis says that the world does not have enough food in its reserves to survive a bad harvest without markets dissolving into significant turmoil and volatility.
The fourth and final solution that is debated about the global food crisis and the sort of science and technology public policy we ought to be embarked on in order to prepare proactively for what some people are calling “a looming crisis” is that we need to do a better job of creating alternative food systems that sit alongside the mainstream or global food system. This is sometimes called the local food movement.
To me, there are two very important reasons the local food movement is going to be critical in the next generation. First of all, it increases the level of literacy among people to food issues. Second, the local food movement, local food systems, provide an insurance policy or a plan B, a buffer that separates the urban consumer from the vagaries of the international market. If the predictions are correct and over the next generation we see radically increasing prices in food, radically more volatile food prices, if these start having the expected political ramifications, we will be glad to have maintained these alternative food systems.
On my last slide I've tried to lay out the four broad policy arenas that are talked about with some degree of seriousness—a strong degree of seriousness—by activists, business leaders, and academics, as a way of proactively preparing ourselves for what some people call the perfect storm of problems that will come in the next generation.
I would like to leave you with one message. If you have the opportunity in deliberating on the Growing Forward 2 program to think globally and holistically, we need strategic investments across these four sectors.
We need strategic investments in science and technology, but emphasizing links between scientists and farmers from around the world. That requires some creative problem solving on the part of different institutions.
We need the managerial and bureaucratic solutions. We need the alternative solutions. And we need to understand how much, and where, food can be stored efficiently.
We need essentially a portfolio of strategies in order to protect ourselves and protect our food system.
In my last few breaths here I would like to say one thing, and that is I think Canada's role in the international food system will grow over the next generation. Our role as a food producer and a food exporter—our resource base—means that as the international food system comes in for what most expect will be some fairly turbulent times, Canada's role will grow. I think this represents a core opportunity for the Canadian agrifood business, as well as a challenge to our international development and humanitarian responsibilities. These things should, and can, be brought together through strategic investments in the four areas I have laid out.
Thank you very much.
:
The short answer is yes.
It's happening now in many markets. Is it universal, and is every product uniquely differentiated for end consumers? No, because there's not enough value in some of those markets to justify the full differentiation.
For virtually every product line where there are GM crops, there are alternate, competing, differentiated attributes. They may be functional attributes that are either GM or non-GM. They may be organic. They may be using a whole variety of other provenance-based elements. Some of it's simply just branded products that somebody thinks have a slightly higher quality control around them.
Yes, we can do it. The challenge, though, is that we have quite diffuse and conflicting international standards, and as long as the governments of the day around the world all want to occupy the centre space and define what are the thresholds for entering or not entering a market, the industry can't step in and do that.
In a few cases, government has done it—drawn the lines—and the markets are being satisfied. In a few places where the government has said, “We're not sure where the line is, but we reserve the right to define the line”, markets have a difficulty stepping in because they'll almost universally be in the wrong space to satisfy regulators down the road. Where the state has said, “We're not going to draw the boundary, that's your job because it's a relationship between the buyer and the seller”--this is not about safety, this is not a safety issue, this is about quality attributes and what people want and are willing to pay for and it's possible to supply--in those cases there have been very effective supply chains that develop that benefit the producers and consumers, both within the supply chain and the other elements in the food chain.
The short answer is yes, it can be done. It's being done pretty much around the world, not just in developed countries, where there are high incomes, but in developing countries as well.
The challenge is that we're spending way more than we should to differentiate those product categories, because we're reinventing the wheel in every market.
If I take you back 50 years, we spent an inordinate amount of our energy as governments trying to harmonize, so that whoever brought a product to market quality assured that product. Now we've renationalized, so we have upwards of 70 or 80 countries who say, “That might be okay, we might accept that it's safe, but we're not quite sure whether it fits with the consumer and producer demands in our market.” The difficulty is that we don't know what those consumer and producer demands are. It's just another group of people making choices. What we've found is that where these supply chains work, it's because buyers and sellers sit down and say, “This is what we want, this is what we'll pay for; this is what the cost will be, and there's value there.”
The numbers coming out of our conference are that about half of the value that could be generated by GM crops has been truncated in the marketplace. We're talking about $5 billion to $10 billion worth of wealth.
:
Thank you for inviting me.
I apologize for not having a formal, written program. I've been travelling for the last couple of weeks. It's always a pleasure to come in and speak. I have this in PowerPoint form.
I've spent over 30 years in the agricultural industry, the first 15 years with the industry in research and development and marketing. Then in Saskatoon I started up Ag-West Biotech in 1989 and helped build a cluster around the ag-biotech sector. I was then Deputy Minister of Agriculture for Saskatchewan. After that, I started Ontario Agri-food Technologies, which is run by Gord Surgeoner today.
I ran a venture capital fund for seven or eight years, where I focused on investing in agricultural technology at the university level. Then I moved a little bit away from agriculture. I went back to Saskatoon and for three years I was the director of business development for the Synchrotron, helping to build the business development side of that research facility.
Two and a half years ago, I came back to Ontario to manage Sustainable Chemistry Alliance and the Bioindustrial Innovation Centre in Sarnia. They are focused on agriculture and the commercialization of the bioindustrial sector.
I wanted to touch on Sustainable Chemistry Alliance and the Bioindustrial Innovation Centre. Sustainable Chemistry Alliance is a facilitator, adviser, and investor in green and sustainable technologies, while the Bioindustrial Innovation Centre is the incubator that provides pilot facility space for green and sustainable technology. We are located in Sarnia. I work closely with the university systems in Ontario, particularly Western.
Our key objective is to establish Sarnia as a model cluster community. We are building off the petroleum expertise in the region and the farming community in Lambton County and the surrounding counties of the region. BIC and SCA are a centre for excellence funded by NSERC and the national centres of excellence.
With respect to the Sustainable Chemistry Alliance, we've set aside some $5 million for investing in startup companies. These are companies that are entering into a kind of valley of death. We're investing in companies and projects on the pilot-to-demonstration scale. We might invest up to a half million dollars in any given project. We ended up with 12 investments. We're just finishing the legal work on the last two or three. We've been able to leverage well over $100 million in other investments. One investment that we recently closed on is BioAmber, which is going to build a full-scale facility in Sarnia. That will create 40 full-time jobs as well as about 150 construction jobs over the next year and a half. The investments we've made have pulled in well over 200 jobs.
We've attracted two companies back to Canada: Ecosynthetix, which uses corn-based materials for paper coatings, selling their product to big pulp and paper mills; and BioAmber, which produces succinic acid. A lot of this research was funded outside Canada by the USDA or the U.S. Department of Energy, and now we have them back with Canada as their headquarters and their first commercial opportunities ahead of them.
The first full-scale biotechnology plant is something that we look at. We look at how to commercialize what we have locally and to help move some of those technologies forward. But how do we attract technologies back into Canada?
The bioindustrial sector is really biomaterials, bio-based chemicals, hybrid chemicals, biomass production and processing, and new crops for alternative use such as switchgrass, miscanthus, and camelina.
I should clarify the term “hybrid chemistry”. In Sarnia we have a strong petroleum-based industry, and as we're developing these bio-based industries we see a partnership between the petroleum and the bio-based industries to build new products, which would be bio-based plus petroleum-based to create what we refer to as a hybrid chemical or a hybrid product. An example of that would be Woodbridge foam. About 20% of their foam uses soybean, and the other 80% comes from petroleum. Almost every car seat for vehicles produced in the world today uses a hybrid foam from Woodbridge.
What are the benefits to agriculture of what we do? Biomass is a new source of income for a number of farmers as we move forward in trying to develop this as a commercial opportunity. Some new crops such as triticale, camelina, sorghum, miscanthus, switchgrass, etc., are being researched today and developed into future crops. And then there's consistent or improved value at the farm gate as we have additional products that the farmers will be able to sell, whether it's corn stover or wheat straw, as they manage those opportunities. Hopefully, as we see these develop we'll see more rural jobs coming from that as well.
Based on the questions I have of what should Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada be doing, particularly as far as Growing Forward 2, there are investment programs. I think a lot of the investment programs like the Agri-Opportunities program that we had in Growing Forward 1...we need to look at those and learn from them. They were excellent programs, from my perspective, but probably were not fully utilized in the way they should have been. And maybe by looking at arm's length and with a little bit more flexibility in those programs, it would help make them much more productive in the future. I use our example of taking $5 million and creating well over $100 million in investment as something that was done at arm's length using funding.
Focused research and development with farmer and industry input into the projects.... I think the earlier speakers talked about the length of time, and I think that's one of the things that we.... Time now has become shortened on a lot of funding, and we need to think about that. As I look at Europe, most European countries now have plans out to 2025 or 2030 on their programs, and they don't change those programs. They might tweak them as they move forward, as they learn from this year and going into next year, but they have a plan that's out there for 20 or 30 years on how they want to develop their agricultural community. We tend to operate on a two-year to four-year timeline, so I think we need to think longer term than that.
Bioindustrial programs, I think, are going to be more important going forward, supporting innovative ideas from the agricultural commodity sector. We'll see new biomaterials, new plastics, and new bio-based chemicals coming on stream, and if we don't do it here, it will be done somewhere.
Attraction to Canada is important. We do not invent everything here, so we should be looking to what's out there that we can bring back into Canada at the same time. Examples are BioAmber and the Ecosynthetix projects that we've had. Recently, I was in South Africa, where we've signed an MOU with an organization down there that has investments in start-up companies in the same sector, so there is an opportunity to create collaboration between companies in South Africa and here in North America.
I have a couple of other quick comments. I think the regulatory framework is a very important one, but I will comment that I've been involved in regulatory for 30-plus years and it's been an ongoing topic for that length of time. My simple solution would be that we have one of the best regulatory systems in the world and I think we should just learn how to use it. That's our biggest problem, that we don't use the system properly. We use it as a system that basically says we're here to protect the Canadian public by not allowing new products in the system, rather than looking at it as something that is a strong science-based system that can be used to get products into the market and create economic benefits for the Canadian consumer and Canadian businesses. That would create farm benefits and so on.
There's an opportunity for Canada to take on a leadership role in bio-based chemistry and the biomaterials sector for agriculture and forestry. We can develop alternative crops and new uses of biomass through the development of innovative ideas; establish a sound science-based, user-friendly, and efficient regulatory system; and have a program for attracting to Canada the right agriculture and bioindustrial companies that we are not seeing here today.
Let's be leaders in that sector and consider arm's-length concepts to increase efficiency in some of our programs.
In summary, Growing Forward 2 has an opportunity to look back at Growing Forward 1 and evaluate what worked well and what did not. There are lessons to be learned and concepts to be improved from Growing Forward 1 to 2, whether it is to continue to support those projects that were innovative, change those with limited success, and/or consider arm's length for programs that need to make timely decisions.
Some research-supported initiatives need to be assessed for progress to development and commercialization, and they need to be supported if progress was made from Growing Forward 1. Then a user-friendly regulatory system should be created with economic development as a mandate.
Thank you.
[Translation]
Good day. It is always a pleasure and a privilege to present our ideas to you.
[English]
The Canadian Horticultural Council is the national association that represents packers, producers, and storage intermediaries of over 120 different fresh fruit and vegetable crops. It's certainly a challenge, and it's an exciting one. Membership includes provincial and national horticultural commodity associations, which represent more than 20,000 producers across Canada, as well as allied service organizations, provincial governments, and individual producers.
I have been with the council since 1999. From 1978 until then, I worked in eastern Canada with the potato association before coming to Ottawa. A good portion of that time was spent working with producers and producer cooperatives, doing their sales and marketing.
As I indicated, horticulture is a highly diversified agricultural production, and it's one of Canada's largest agrifood industries. For example, Canadians spend more than $14 billion a year on fruit and vegetable products in retail stores. That's 25% of all retail expenditures.
So how do we grow? How do we maintain that market and grow the product category? Certainly it's going to be through a range of innovation.
With $5 billion in cash receipts, horticulture is also a very large sector of agriculture production. It's a major source of farm cash receipts in British Columbia and Prince Edward Island, and it accounts for more than half of crop receipts in provinces outside of the Prairies.
Of course, as in all sectors, we have been affected by globalization, loss of science capacity, which is of particular interest to you in the work you're currently doing, as well as a number of other items.
My comments will be centred around improving food diversity and security, enhancing agricultural sustainability, and developing new markets. To the extent possible, I'll try to tie that in to innovation.
When we do talk about fruit and vegetable sales and consumption in Canada, it's important to note that three of every four dollars that consumers spend on fruit and vegetables are for imported product. Our exports to the United States are significant, and, as you can well imagine, a favourable regulatory environment is important to us.
Now with regard to that three of every four dollars spent, obviously there are some crops we're not going to ever be in a position to grow, but certainly there are some imported crops we could look to perhaps replace with Canadian product.
As a group, I like to think we've been innovative over time, and certainly we do have some measure of success. The seasonal agricultural worker program is a good example. That began over 40 years ago, through the efforts of the Canadian Horticultural Council and its members. The original memorandum of understanding for that program with the Government of Canada lies with the Canadian Horticultural Council.
We believe our efforts were integral in establishing the AAFC Pest Management Centre, which you've heard a lot about over time, and that contributes to our competitiveness. Certainly the work they do in liaison with the PMRA is helping to bring innovation to the sector, which is much needed.
On food safety, the CanadaGAP program, which we worked so hard on over a number of years, for producers, packers, and storage intermediaries, is the only food safety program in Canada that is benchmarked to the global food safety initiative. That's a tremendous success story for our minister, the department, and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
With regard to improving food diversity and security, how do we do that? We do it by Canadians, for Canadians. It's a priority that can only be achieved through dialogue, understanding, collaboration, and a good measure of innovation.
So what do we need? We need adequate funding for research in innovation. The previous speakers have touched on different aspects of that and raised some very good points.
We need to take appropriate actions to develop and implement policies and programs that foster producer profitability. That includes a number of traditional means, as well as some non-traditional means, whether it be through innovation or various types of risk management programs in the very broadest sense. We need to ensure a favourable regulatory environment.
All of these things do begin on the farm, and prosperity at the farm gate will drive prosperity beyond the farm gate. A consistent, safe, and nutritious quality product that's produced in a sustainable and competitive manner, which includes timely access to new and innovative technologies, and a host of risk mitigation tools that are marketed at a reasonable price with full and timely payment, provides long-term benefits. That is a true recipe for innovation and sustainability.
Research and innovation are critically important to maintaining our competitiveness, and certainly the announcement of the Canadian agri-science clusters initiative was received with enthusiasm and a sense of opportunity for horticulture, and indeed all of agriculture, and I believe the program has been very well subscribed.
It certainly had a stated purpose: to encourage key agricultural organizations to mobilize and coordinate a critical mass of scientific and technical capacity within industry, within government, and within academia to create, design, and implement a national program of applied science, tech transfer, and commercialization plans in support of sector-developed strategies.
In 2009, again considering that we have a broad group of crops and very diverse needs, we did look to rationalize our priorities and needs vis-à-vis research and innovation, and those discussions brought us to five theme areas: health and wellness, food safety and quality, production and production systems, environmental performance of the horticultural system, which of course includes pest management, and energy management and efficiency. And certainly the greenhouse sector has been very much a leader in looking at that area, in particular through cost management, but also looking to ensure Canadian production on a 12-month basis. So I think all of those priorities certainly align themselves very much with Government of Canada priorities as well.
So the result has been an agri-science cluster for horticulture, which is enabling industry and researchers to collaborate and work towards the goals of enhanced profitability and competitiveness through the use of scientific and technical resources to support innovation strategies. The cluster has provided industry an opportunity to collectively leverage government funds and available research in a coordinated response to industry priorities.
We have heard some comments around the approval process and application process. I certainly do have to echo that, that when you have a five-year program and it's two years in before you can begin accessing funds, while they're greatly appreciated and are being put to good use, it does make it a little bit difficult, because obviously science is not a short-term undertaking.
Innovation does maintain and enhance our competitiveness, and there are potential benefits and synergies that will be accrued through the cluster by improving coordination.
In the document that was passed around, we do have a summary of the projects that we do have under way through the cluster, which you can review at your leisure. Some of them are certainly of note, I think. One in particular has to do with small fruit and is being focused on blueberries. It is working with the equipment manufacturers to look at better use of technology in the fields. In this project they're going through and looking to apply crop protection management technologies to the field, and through a series of sensors and cameras they're able to discern what is the actual plant and what is the weed and spot-spray accordingly. So it's quite fascinating. And certainly we'd love to make some of this available to you any time, show you some videos. So there are some interesting things going on.
As for challenges and opportunities, a lot of them are production-related. And we cannot discount that some of the very basic research lies in that area. It's not always making the best press or the most glamour, but again, that's where it begins. If there isn't that high-quality, consistently available raw product, then the processors and everybody else along the line aren't going to be able to thrive either.
As regards access to and commercialization of new varieties, again, varieties are a long-term undertaking, but that's what's driving a lot of market growth and innovation.
I did want to touch a little bit on markets, both domestic and international, and the Market Access Secretariat that's doing a lot of work. Minister attended a session this week where they released their first report. I think it's been a good addition to helping the industry grow and differentiate itself through highlighting different things we do.
I think perhaps I will leave it at that. I do know you have questions, or there are other things I could talk about.
Crop protection technology is critically important. I know you've heard that over time. But, again, research plays a big piece in addressing that. One particular problem that we have that we're working on through the cluster is wireworm. It's a huge problem in the potato industry across Canada, and particularly serious right now in eastern Canada. In Prince Edward Island itself, the Minister of Agriculture is chairing a task force because it's so severe, and the financial losses are pretty significant. It impacts carrots as well, and a lot of fields have been abandoned this year for harvest because of that.
I'll leave it at that.
:
Of course, and again, we have a number of them highlighted here.
One of the challenges we had in addressing the science cluster was—of course, you have 120 crops—how you are going to manage that in terms of defining priorities. We already had some experience working on our food safety program in crop groupings where some things made sense. We had done that in food safety based on risks. We had potato root crop, leafy greens, small fruit, and tree fruit somewhat based on risk. We followed that pattern because we did find it to be very successful. Our members were comfortable with it and already accustomed to working together. We went through deliberations on trying to identify priorities within those crop groupings. Then there were priorities that rose to the top, and projects were submitted. Some were approved and some weren't.
In tree fruit, there are two projects currently on the go. One is advanced post-harvest handling and storage technology for Canadian apples. There are a few details here listed with the objectives. That work is nicely under way right now. One of the newer projects that is under way now—and this is a longer-term one that is going to have a good platform and applicability for a whole host of other crops—is identifying genetic markers to enhance apple breeding in Canada. It's really looking to lay a foundation for a large-scale marker-assisted apple breeding program by collecting genomic data from over 1,000 different apple cultivars. What you have is a filing cabinet of material, as you need to quickly react in the market, whether it's pest disease, consumer demand, etc.—a whole host of things—to move perhaps a bit more quickly to changing variety. Those are a couple.
I spoke on the blueberry piece already and what's going on. That one is quite exciting. It's certainly getting a lot of attention. We have a couple of water projects on the go. Those are really related to food safety. Those are very key. There are some gaps in food safety in terms of the science needed to support programs. Certainly, we very much want food safety to remain--let's keep it to the science and nothing else. Water is an area where there are some universal gaps.
Those are exciting pieces.
With regard to the potato, we have some ongoing work—the late blight, and then now the work on wireworm. The potato is a particularly interesting one in regard to expertise in Canada. With wireworm in particular, the only game in town is Agriculture Canada. All that is to say that we need Agriculture Canada facilities and scientists. Certainly, we have a concern that we see that diminishing. We've heard earlier about how the capacity is being lost. How are we attracting and bringing in new scientists? We very much need the department and its expertise.
Those are just a few. I could go on and on, but I won't.
:
Well, I think a lot of it is....
The flow-through share is one concept that we use a lot. I have been on the board of BIOTECanada, and we've always positioned that as something that would be good to have on the life science side beyond the oil and gas sector. If you look at the success it's created on that side, we feel it could benefit this side as well.
I work closely with the people in Guelph--Gord Surgeoner's on my board, and I'm on the board of Bioenterprise as well--and we talk a lot amongst ourselves on things that are needed, looking at trying to create a venture capital fund for agriculture through Bioenterprise, as you're probably aware, and having some success there. People aren't closing the door in our faces, anyway; they're listening to the story. We'll see what happens.
But that's more of a private sector fund. The other area I see that's needed, or that would be nice, would be some way to provide guaranteed loans. When I look south of the border, when we're having discussions with the bio-based chemistry industry about locating in Canada, a lot of them find that when they're south of the border they can get a $50-million-plus guaranteed loan quite readily from the federal system there, and probably some other state funds. We don't need that size, though, I don't think.
When BioAmber made the decision to locate in Canada, they looked at 100 locations. The other 99 locations were in the U.S. They looked at four or five locations very diligently, but at the end of the day they made the decision to come to Sarnia.
In that decision, we were able to work with them over the last six or eight months to help cobble together some funding of around $35 million between provincial and federal funding. They made the decision to be in Canada simply because it made more sense from a practical standpoint and a financial standpoint for them to be located in a place like Sarnia rather than in the middle of a cornfield in Iowa. They are, at the end of the day, in the chemical business once they produce their bio-based chemical.