[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]
Tuesday, October 22, 1996
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[English]
The Co-Chairman (Mr. Graham): We now have the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research. Gentlemen, thank you very much for joining us this morning.
We're now going to make this a joint meeting of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade and the Standing Committee on Agriculture. The chair of the Standing Committee on Agriculture, Mr. Vanclief, is with me, and various members of that committee are here.
We understand you had a meeting with the minister but because of changes in ministerial responsibilities that had to be cancelled. We're sorry for that, but we're glad to have an opportunity to meet with you this morning.
I must say this committee held a hearing on world food security in connection with the World Food Summit just some ten days ago. That was a very interesting exercise for us, so we're pleased to be able to follow this up on a more technical level. Thank you very much for coming.
We are really here only for 35 or 40 minutes, so if you could make a brief intervention, members could ask questions, or whatever you feel would be appropriate.
Mr. Per Pinstrup-Andersen (Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Honourable members of Parliament, ladies and gentlemen, it is indeed an honour and a pleasure to have the opportunity to appear before this joint meeting of the two committees. It is particularly a pleasure because of the tremendous importance of Canadian participation at the international level in assuring food security for all and in ensuring the right kind of action is undertaken so poor people all over the world may eat better.
I want to emphasize the not only important but essential role Canada is playing in one of the most important development efforts to achieve food security without doing damage to the environment. That is the group we represent here today, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research. Canada was part of the group that got this initiative started some 25 years ago, and Canada has been and continues to be an essential partner in this effort.
Mr. Chairman, I'd like to spend just three or four minutes talking about general issues related to food security and malnutrition.
The population growth we will experience over the next 25 years, together with increasing incomes in many developing countries - certainly in Asia, Latin America, and we hope in Africa - together with increased urbanization and changing lifestyles, will result in an increase in the demand for food of about 80% in the developing world between now and the year 2020. That's the demand for cereals. The demand for root crops will go up by about the same amount, and the demand for meat will go up by a staggering 160% over the next 25 years.
This increase in global food demand can be met, and it can be met without dramatic increases in real food prices. But with business as usual it is going to be met by means of further degradation of natural resources, such as deforestation, which now occurs at the rate of about 1% per year in the rain forests. It will occur at the expense of further land degradation and misuse of water, unless we change the way things are done. That is why the World Food Summit is so important, and that's why the continued Canadian contributions to these efforts, including agricultural research, are so extremely important.
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Trade will increase. Developing countries will not be able to meet the increase in food demand I have just mentioned. We estimate the developing countries will more than double their grain imports between now and the year 2020, and their imports of meat will go up approximately twenty times - not twenty percent, but twenty times. So there will be a tremendous future market in developing countries both for agricultural commodities and for other goods and services.
But that will very much depend on the extent to which we help developing countries grow. With rapid economic growth a large share of the additional income will be spent in trade. That links back to the question I started out with, namely the importance of continuing to invest in the right kind of action, including agricultural research.
We have estimated that for each dollar Canada or my country, Denmark, or the United States grants to agricultural research for developing countries, these countries will increase their imports by four dollars. So foreign assistance to agricultural research and related activities is an investment. It is an investment in our mutual future, not only in the sense that if globalization is to be successful we cannot sit back while millions are killed and go malnourished and many hundreds of millions of people go to bed hungry. That will not assure international stability. Beyond that, we can invest in more trade for the mutual benefit of Canada and other countries.
I want to make one other point. The role of agriculture in driving economic growth in low-income developing countries has been under-appreciated during the last ten to fifteen years in many countries, presumably including Canada. Back in the 1960s and early 1970s investments were made in southeast and east Asia to get agriculture moving. Those are now paying off in rapid rates of economic growth in those countries and rapid rates of increase in foreign trade, including imports from the industrialized nations.
That lesson somehow hasn't had the necessary impact on what we are doing in the lower-income developing countries today. We need to help the lower-income developing countries get their agriculture moving. For every country I have ever heard of, with the exception of Singapore, if you have a stagnant agricultural sector you have a stagnant economy. Countries pass through this phase. It is less important now in Korea and Taiwan and other high-income developing countries, but that's because investments were made back in the 1960s and 1970s.
So the point I'd like to leave with you is that strengthened cooperation with developing countries is going to help poor people become less poor, and we hope not poor. It is going to help little children grow well. That ought to be the purpose of our foreign assistance. But in this day and age we are really much more talking about cooperation for the mutual benefit of everybody involved. That is why foreign assistance should no longer be seen as a handout. It is an investment in all the things I have just mentioned, including our own economic future.
As you can tell, Mr. Chairman, this is a topic I could go on discussing for hours. It is not in anybody's interest that I do so, so I shall stop. But I would very much appreciate your permission to call on one of my colleagues, Michel Petit from the World Bank, to say a few things about the interaction at the international level. Before I do so, however, let me say a couple more words on the organization we represent.
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The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research is a consortium of about 50 or so national government and international organizations. Canada, of course, is a member of CGIAR. It supports 16 international agricultural research centres spread around the world, with most of them located in developing countries.
We have well-defined priorities for the research we do, but the overall goal is to help poor people get rid of their poverty - to alleviate poverty, malnutrition and food insecurity. We do this by working with national institutions in developing countries, as well as many institutions in the industrialized nations, including Canada.
Let me stop here. We have material that we would be delighted to leave with you that gives further details. We will be glad to try to answer any questions you may have, Mr. Chairman. But with your permission, I would like to call on Mr. Petit, if I may.
The Co-Chairman (Mr. Graham): Thank you, Dr. Pinstrup-Andersen. As the director general of the International Food Policy Research Institute, I'm sure you could go on for a long time, so we appreciate your brevity. But I know there will be some interesting questions.
Yes, sir.
[Translation]
Dr. Michel Petit (Director of Agricultural Research, Environmentally Sustainable Development at the World Bank, Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Ladies and gentlemen, I'm speaking of behalf of the World Bank, where I'm responsible for the support group for agronomic research. Allow me to state briefly at the outset that the Bank is very proud of having taken part in the creation of the CGIAR and of its continuing support for that group. We think that this is one of the great success stories in development aid in all areas.
However, we are somewhat worried because despite the fact that the World Food Summit will soon take place, agriculture has lost some of its profile in debates and its visibility in the discourse about development. We tend to forget what Dr. Pinstrup-Andersen has just said, namely that agricultural development in developing countries is absolutely critical if we want to eradicate poverty, ensure nutritional security and fight against social exclusion and marginalization, all this while protecting the environment. Our president, Mr. Wolfensohn is aware of this problem and has made rural development a top priority on the agenda of development problems.
The second concern is what we call the urban bias. Many economic policies, macroeconomic policies, currency policies, fiscal policies and border protection policies discriminate against agriculture in many developing countries. It is up to the international community to attempt persuasion and to correct this urban bias.
Given this perspective, we are convinced that support for agronomic research is absolutely essential and my message, if you will allow me, is to ask you for Canada's continued support in this effort.
The Bank is very pleased to have had the cooperation of prominent Canadian representatives. One of the sons of this country, Maurice Strong, coined the name CGIAR and I'm proud now to be one of his colleagues at the Bank.
We are somewhat concerned about the situation in Canada. We know that like many other countries, you are experiencing budgetary difficulties. However, we hope that with a view to a conscious partnership of interdependence, as was pointed out by Dr. Per Pinstrup-Anderson, agronomic research will continue to be one of the areas in which this can be best demonstrated by implementing procedures, arrangements and various partnerships, by mobilizing both the most vigorous forces, the Canadian scientific community, researchers in developing countries and researchers in international centres that are represented here, in the interest of the fight against poverty and of Canadian agriculture, for example for the conservation of genetic resources, which is in the interest of all human beings.
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Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Co-Chairman (Mr. Graham): Thank you very much, Dr. Petit.
[English]
Mr. Calder.
Mr. Calder (Wellington - Grey - Dufferin - Simcoe): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Gentlemen, both my colleague, Wayne Easter, and I were in Washington in 1994 when Vision 2020 was there. Dr. Andersen, I remember you speaking. I had the same concerns then that I have now.
I make a lot of speeches to urban people, and one of the things I like referring to more than anything else is an apple I use to represent the world. Out of that apple I cut a 32nd slice and throw the rest of the apple away, because that represents oceans, mountain ranges, deserts, cities, roads, etc. If you cut the skin off the top of that 32nd slice, it represents class one and class two agricultural land from which you will be feeding the eight billion people you're talking about in the year 2020.
Doctor, you said that meat consumption will go up by 160%, and it will probably be largely due to the fact that in China we're seeing a rural-to-urban shift, so they are eating meat instead of cereals. By the time we get to 2020, we will probably be figuring the percentage of protein per acre instead of per tonne. That's one of the big things.
I think there's a lot of responsibility. I'm a chicken farmer and I'm producing all the chicken I can. I'm a supporter of the food grains bank. I'm giving away any extra product to help feed the hungry of the world. When we were down there in 1994, I still remember the president of Uganda saying her country had increased its coffee production and was the fifth-largest coffee producer in the world. I thought that was great. I asked her on what land they were growing that coffee, and she said it was their best. Then I asked her what land the people of Uganda were growing their food on. Obviously, they seemed to be looking more at cashflow than at feeding the people of their country. It is a concern.
How do we make these third world countries develop policies within their own countries to deal with the conservation of land and water?
The Co-Chairman (Mr. Graham): You're confident we're doing it properly here, are you?
Mr. Calder: I think so.
Dr. Pinstrup-Andersen: Mr. Chairman, maybe I can suggest at least a part answer, and ask my colleagues if they would like to add anything.
First of all, I think the way we convince the Ugandan farmers to produce food for the Ugandan people rather than coffee for the European market is to help the Ugandan farmer produce more food per unit of land. Then it would become more profitable to produce maize, or whatever food the Ugandan farmer can produce, than to produce coffee.
One of the problems we're faced with right now is there has been a lot of research done on coffee over the years, so coffee can be extremely productive and yield a very high income for the producer. There is nothing wrong with that as long as the producer is a small farmer who uses the money to feed her family. But there has been very little research done on the food crops the Ugandan farmer needs to produce in order to feed the Ugandan population.
One of the things we're trying to do, both within the system we represent and in the national agricultural research systems in Uganda and elsewhere, is redress that balance so farmers can make more money producing food than producing coffee. We may then have to turn to drinking tea or other things, but we can handle that. It seems to me it is the productivity increases we need to go for in food production.
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[Translation]
The Co-Chairman (Mr. Graham): Mr. Paré.
Mr. Paré (Louis-Hébert): In the testimony we hear at the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade, whenever the discussion turns to public aid for development and international cooperation, we are often reminded of the importance of women's participation in the development of these developing countries. I'm therefore surprised there are no women among the witnesses that we are welcoming here today. It may be worthwhile to invite women to be part of your delegation in future appearances. But that is not my main comment.
It is generally recognized that the problem of worldwide poverty is not one of resources, but of distribution.
Moreover, it should be noted that in developed countries, the budget for public development aid is constantly decreasing. That's the case in Canada as in many other countries. We get the impression that by establishing commercial links and free trade, we can settle any kind of problems. That, in a nutshell, is the universal message that is currently being disseminated.
To illustrate that this is not a problem of resources, I would take the example of what developed countries, such as Canada as well as the United States, are preparing to do. They are preparing to experiment with using grain to produce ethanol. It seems to me ludicrous to conduct such experiments when there are people dying of hunger. So it's not always a question of resources.
In closing, I'd like to remind you that China, with 6 per cent of arable land, has managed up until now to feed approximately a quarter of the earth population. So in my opinion, the real problem... Let me put the question to you instead. Isn't the real issue raising awareness in developed countries about the distribution of wealth?
[English]
Dr. Pinstrup-Andersen: Mr. Chairman, I think that kind of awareness is extremely important, but let me address the question of poverty or distribution versus production, because I think it is a very important issue.
Let us take a case in point. A very poor African woman is trying to grow enough food for her six children on a small piece of land. She succeeds once in a while, but every time the insects come she fails, the children become malnourished, and possibly some of them die. Or the drought will hit from time to time. It is an extremely difficult environment to work in. She probably doesn't have markets for her commodities and so on.
What this farmer with the very low income needs is access to markets and to inputs, but before that she needs access to the kind of technology that would permit her to produce more on the land that she has. That is where the link between production and poverty eradication comes in. It's at that level that the system is working. It's trying to provide to the millions of small farmers, most of whom are women... And I regret that we do not have a better gender balance in the CGIAR or on this committee. We will work on that.
That's where the link comes in. Therefore it seems to me it isn't a matter of expanding the pile of food at the global level. That is also an issue, but I think we can probably do that with the help of Canada and many other exporting countries. The issue really is how we help the 80% of the world's poor people who live in rural areas and depend directly or indirectly on agriculture. We help them by generating productivity increases among small farmers. That in turn translates into income generation in the rest of the rural area and subsequently in the urban area.
The Chinese case is such a beautiful case, which, beginning in the late 1970s with policy changes and technological changes in agriculture, initially generated a lot of additional production and income in the agricultural sector, very quickly followed by employment and income generation outside of agriculture because farmers were spending their money.
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It's that kind of engine we have to start or have to push. That is why I think production and poverty eradication will go hand in hand if we do it in the right way. If we do it in the wrong way, we can have a lot of production and a lot of poor people. In fact, that is what we are currently witnessing. We have 1.3 billion people who earn less than a dollar a day. We have 800 million people who don't have enough food to eat.
Yet real food prices in the international market are going down, so we seem to be doing okay. We're not. We're doing a terrible job. So many people can't get to the market and compete for that food. That's why prices keep falling.
I will stop talking, Mr. Chairman, because my colleagues are going to beat me up if I dominate the conversation.
The Co-Chairman (Mr. Graham): That's just because you're travelling with a bunch of men, you see -
Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
The Co-Chairman (Mr. Graham): - and you have to worry about this pugilistic aspect.
Dr. Pinstrup-Andersen: You're probably right.
The Co-Chairman (Mr. Graham): If there's no follow-up,
[Translation]
Dr. Petit, would you like to add anything?
Dr. Petit: I'd be pleased to answer the question on free trade and comment on coffee production in Uganda. I think that generally speaking, the trend toward free trade is something very positive for developing countries and that they benefit from that, in terms of a general trend. However, it is clear that this will not be the answer to all problems. We all agree on that.
I believe that to Ugandans, free trade can mean that it's probably a good thing for them to produce coffee, if that's what they can sell, because naturally, they need to buy many other goods. Moreover, the great danger of, is that what we call public assets in the jargon of economists, what is not produced in the marketplace, particularly research on the crops for the poor and the protection of the environment, will not be provided adequately by private research or private development.
That's why the efforts of the CGIAR, which is essentially a public effort, is so important otherwise we would not have research on what we call orphan crops, for example. The private sector will not finance research on cassava. It may do so for corn, coffee or cotton, which is what we were discussing earlier.
Therefore, I don't think that free trade is necessarily a bad thing, and this is the Frenchman speaking. Is free trade a bad thing? On the contrary, but we have to be aware of the limits and make the proper adjustments. That is what I'm calling upon you to do. Thank you.
[English]
The Co-Chairman (Mr. Graham): Thank you, Mr. Petit. Mr. Mills.
Mr. Mills (Red Deer): Yes, gentlemen, I have a couple of comments. One of them stems from what Mr. Calder said earlier about his apple and the peel on the 1/32nd of the apple.
Particularly in North America... I look at my own city as an example. We just took a section of the very best farmland that produces 100 bushels to the acre every year - and held another section - and we're putting a landfill on that. We have taken 32 sections of prime agricultural land out of production - again, with topsoil six feet deep - and we're building a city on that. That's just one place. I see this in every city and in every town I go to right across this country and in the U.S. The amount of land we're taking out of production seems like a horrendous amount, and I don't think we have addressed that problem or even come close to addressing that problem as Canadians or North Americans or whatever.
And I look at another interesting question. When we were visiting Southeast Asia this summer, we heard ``We will buy all of the pork you can produce and all of the beef you can produce, and you just have to produce quality and quantity in the amounts that we want''.
We have a packing plant in my riding where they say we can handle 400% more if we could get the pigs. The problem is that nobody... And everybody's applying to expand. We have some pig farms with thousands and thousands of sows. They want to double, triple or quadruple - 400% growth is possible - but they can't get the environmental permission to go ahead. Nobody wants them next door.
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So it seems to me these are the kinds of problems we had better start addressing here if we're going to supply the eight billion people, and maybe twelve billion people, and so on. I think the two I've addressed are almost a universal problem, and there are many more.
Are there comments? That's what I'm observing. Did I say it all? Well...
The Co-Chairman (Mr. Graham): I think it's fair to say that Alberta is not the only part of this country where urbanization is creeping onto valuable farm land. We can see it in Ontario, too, so it's a good point.
Maybe this gentleman wants to add something to that.
Dr. Hubert Zandstra (Director General, International Potato Center, Lima, Peru): I'm Hubert Zandstra, the director of the International Potato Center. We work on potatoes and sweet potatoes. But I do know the region the honourable Bob Mills speaks of, having worked in Melfort, Saskatchewan, and on those soils.
Indeed I think the issue of land loss and environmental damage caused by production is an important one anywhere in the world. It is, however, a different one in developing countries, where we are not facing a situation of excess pig manure but a situation of an exceeding lack of input, lack of ground cover, a loss of soil through erosion, and a loss of biodiversity through the effects of poorly managed agriculture and a lack of agricultural research.
I think it is in a way the mirror image of what's happening here, which is strongly polluted; it's an excess, whereas there it's an insufficiency. I think we should recognize, and certainly the CGIAR recognizes, that there is a task there to try to address the resource damage caused by production, particularly by those who have no money.
The poorest of poor are the ones who damage the environment in the developing countries, and to extract from them the consciousness that they must do better and not damage the environment is adding insult to injury. We must first increase their income before we can expect them to improve the environment.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Co-Chairman (Mr. Graham): Thank you, sir.
Mr. Assadourian.
Mr. Assadourian (Don Valley North): Thank you very much.
Mr. Chairman, this is the second hearing we've had in the last couple of weeks about food. I'm glad to see food is becoming the issue of the day. But my concern is that at the last meeting and this meeting nobody has discussed the food we produce from the sea. I don't know why, because I think the sea has a good potential to feed the hungry in the world, but nobody here represents any organization that is addressing the food we may be able to produce from the sea.
The global ratio is one-third land base to two-thirds water, but it's not being used in the same ratio to produce. Is there a problem, or is there not enough research? What can we do to improve the situation so we can produce more food to humanity through the sea?
Dr. Pinstrup-Andersen: Mr. Chairman, I think that is an extremely important issue.
Within the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research we have recognized this area as being a very important area for additional research. A new centre was created a few years ago to deal specifically with aquatic resources.
Some of the work that has been done so far has looked at the extent to which marine fisheries can be recuperated to the point of actually expanding production. It looks very grim, as I'm sure you know as well as I do. It is unlikely that marine fisheries will produce more over the next 25 years because of the exploitation that has taken place in the past, which to a large extent, of course, is due to the open access and the very rapid increases in the technology used for marine fisheries.
There are also some issues of an international legislative aspect as to who should be given access to what parts of the marine fisheries. So there is a whole set of issues there that the system will look at while at the same time we're doing biological research on trying to improve productivity, both in marine fisheries and in aquaculture.
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Aquaculture, as you know, has increased very rapidly during the last twenty years, and there are some concerns as to whether or not it will continue to increase to meet future demands for fish. The projections that we have within the system indicate that fish prices, as opposed to most other stable food commodities, will increase in the future. So this is certainly an area we are looking at.
The institute specifically focused on that area of research is called ICLARM. It is located in the Philippines, and I'm pleased to say that the director general of that centre is a woman - and a very qualified one at that.
The Co-Chairman (Mr. Graham): Thank you, Mr. Pinstrup-Andersen. Mr. Hoeppner.
Mr. Hoeppner (Lisgar - Marquette): Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'm going to get back to the gentleman's issue on the potatoes.
In Canada, as you know, the farmer is continually asked to produce more for less. But when you get the final product on the shelves so that the consumer can buy it, it always goes up. I picked up a little bag of roasted wheat germ in the airport here just a few months ago. It's a new product. If I figured it back to what that would bring, it was sixty times what I got for the wheat at the farm. A box of corn flakes is something like thirty or forty times the cost of the actual product. So how can we continue to raise the costs by adding value to this product, yet still expect foreign countries to buy it? How can we even expect farmers in other countries to produce it if they don't get a decent return?
Dr. Pinstrup-Andersen: There are some niche markets in developing countries for highly processed expensive foods. It seems to me that certainly my country, Denmark, would do well by exploring those niche markets, and I suspect that Canada may wish to do that as well.
In most cases, developing countries do not consist of uniformly poor people. You have a very dramatic difference between the rich and the poor, as you do in the country where I currently reside down south. But there are niche markets in most developing countries, certainly in southeast and east Asia, where highly processed foods can be sold at reasonable prices, I think.
Mr. Hoeppner: That's not helping the poor.
Dr. Pinstrup-Andersen: No, and it's not going to solve the poverty problem.
Dr. Zandstra: Just to give you an idea of the efficiency of production, it typically costs about 14¢ of the American dollar - make that 18¢ of the Canadian dollar - to produce a kilogram of potatoes in Canada. It costs about 25¢ where the potato comes from, in Peru and most of Latin America. The efficiencies here are very high. In the developing countries, because of a lack of access to technology and infrastructure, the efficiencies are low and the cost of food tends to be high.
Thank you.
The Co-Chairman (Mr. Graham): Dr. Terry.
Dr. Eugene Terry (Director General, West African Rice Development Association, Bouaké, Côte d'Ivoire): I suspect some of my colleagues are a little reluctant to get into the question of politics. Clearly, the question was asked about prime land going to coffee. Why some of that land is not being devoted to food crops has to do with those who have power and those who do not have power.
My question to you concerns what influence and what leverage you have as politicians and as policy-makers in a country that certainly has been tremendously respected in the rest of the world. What leverage do you have over leaders of Third World countries to begin to correct some of these contradictions?
The Co-Chairman (Mr. Graham): Of course the foreign affairs committee of this country has enormous leverage that resonates throughout this country and around the world. But we have a lot of difficulty getting our will here, without trying to extend it beyond the boundaries, Dr. Terry - but I know what you mean.
I think it's an educational function, and I know many of our members have travelled and spoken with world leaders. That's one of our functions, and it is an opportunity for us to learn. It also allows us to share our experience with other politicians in other countries, and we do that. By learning from you today, it enriches us. And when we meet with our colleagues in other countries - we'll be going to the former Soviet Union shortly - it enables us to share these experiences with the political leaders. In that sense, I think this type of meeting is very helpful for all of us.
But you're quite right, there are many constraints on our ability to exercise power.
We have Mr. Easter, then I'm going to Mr. Hermanson, and then I think we'll have to...
Mr. Easter (Malpeque): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
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To be honest about it, I think even countries have less and less influence in the new globalization than we used to have. In the world we now live in the political space, if I can put it this way, in terms of having influence, is getting smaller and smaller, while the economic space is getting larger and larger. That's where the influence is coming from.
I hardly know where to start, Mr. Chairman.
Dr. Pinstrup-Andersen, I would agree with you there's no better area we can make investment in than research, even globally. You talked about the importance of cooperation for mutual benefit, and I agree with that. But at the same time, as I said, we live in a world where ``cooperation'' is a word you don't even hear any more. You're one of the first to have said it in my term in Parliament here. The word we hear all the time is ``competition''. Let the market decide. I think the key question that has to be asked about this research, about the new technologies, about basically everything we do, especially in the third world, is who controls it and who benefits.
I'm sitting on a dignity-of-work committee. We're looking at a different issue, but I think it applies. I will read from Jeremy Rifkin's book, The End of Work. He talks about the technological revolution and how it offers great promise for social transformation but there are also risks:
- If, however, the dramatic productivity gains of the high-tech revolution are not shared, but
rather used primarily to enhance corporate profit, to the exclusive benefit of stockholders, top
corporate managers, and the emerging elite of the high-tech knowledge workers, chances are
that the growing gap between the haves and the have-nots will lead to social and political
upheaval on a global scale.
We're up against a contradiction of sorts, with the market being the ultimate deciding factor and the way, in the issue we're discussing here, the market, to be quite honest with you, doesn't give a damn about people or poverty. It just doesn't give a damn. But we're in a world today, with the global trade agreements as they are, such that the market - not politics, the market - is the absolute deciding factor. With these two policies working in contradiction to one another, how, in this day and age, do we as representatives of the Canadian government meld that contradiction, to keep in mind people's concerns versus the market? There's an easy question.
The Co-Chairman (Mr. Graham): Mr. Easter has never made these observations before.
Dr. Petit: Let me volunteer a brief answer: support the CGIAR.
Dr. Pinstrup-Andersen: Mr. Chairman, on a more serious note, this is of critical importance. We have to focus science on poor people's problems. Otherwise I think the honourable member of Parliament is correct: there is a real risk the haves will get more and the have-nots will get less. That is precisely what we're here to suggest to you, that technology can be used and modern science can be used to solve poor people's problems, or it can be left to the market and the private sector, in which case it will solve some poor people's problems but certainly many of the problems of the less poor and non-poor. I think that is of critical importance. What we also have to do is to focus on primary health care, primary education, access to jobs, and access to resources by poor people in developing countries and our own countries alike.
When we put this together with agricultural research aimed at increasing incomes and productivity among the rural poor, then I think we have a winner.
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Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Co-Chairman (Mr. Graham): I wonder if I could just follow on Mr. Easter's question, though, because when we were doing the World Food Summit, I asked this same question of the people who were there.
What are we going to do with the World Trade Organization and the new form of international agreements on ownership of biotechnological developments, which will be in the hands of Cargill and these large corporations? In fact they're going to own all of the feed stocks and all of the things you've talked about.
All your research is going to end up somewhere else. It isn't going to end up in the hands of the people you say it's going to end up with; it's going to end up in the hands of corporations in New York or someplace, isn't it? That seems to be the way we're going.
I guess Mr. Easter's question is how do we avoid that.
Dr. Geoffrey Hawtin (Director General of the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute in Rome, Italy): If you look at the crops that are most important to poor people - and some of them have been mentioned here, such as cassava, sweet potatoes and so on - these are, at least for the foreseeable future, very unlikely to be of any significant interest to the Cargills of this world. To the extent they are interested in those crops, it will be in producing varieties and products for the richer sector of developing countries that can afford to buy the inputs, which is very often what they're interested in.
So for a long time to come, certainly for the crops that we, as a group concerned with international research on poverty, are most concerned about, I don't think we're going to see a significant move in that direction.
We are very concerned about that issue. As a system, we have the largest collections of different types of food crops. Something like 600,000 different samples of the major food crops are being maintained by the CGIAR. This material is all freely available. Canada is a recipient of this material as much as any other country. It's freely available globally.
Canada in fact maintains duplicates of some of the collections in the gene bank here in Ottawa as a service to the global community. We have agreements with FAO that no intellectual property rights will be taken out on that material. So there is some sort of guarantee that this will indeed remain public good material.
The Co-Chairman (Mr. Graham): We have Mr. Hermanson and then we'll have to draw to a close, because we are running seriously over our limit and I think most of the members have other obligations. So maybe you could be brief.
Mr. Hermanson (Kindersley - Lloydminster): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
In your presentation, which I didn't hear all of, you mentioned aid. There's been some discussion about aid versus trade. Of course trade is commercial transactions with money. Sometimes governments are involved and sometimes it's the private sector that is involved in trade.
Aid is a different story. There are several different forms of aid. One common form of aid is a government subsidizing or guaranteeing loans and so on to other governments in underdeveloped or developing countries to purchase goods from a developed country. Then of course there are the aid packages through NGOs.
An observation I've made is it seems quite often government-to-government aid is subject to more abuse. Often a government in a foreign country that's perhaps not as responsible as we would like to see will take advantage of government-to-government aid and then bump up spending for its military or do inhumane things to its own people as a result of the benefits received by government-to-government aid. Whereas when NGOs provide aid to other countries, they often bypass governments at both ends and it seems as if the aid, whether it be in the area of research or in the form of direct food aid for hungry people, is much more effective.
What would you suggest to governments to improve aid? How do we get away from this government-to-government aid, which seems to be more subject to abuse and misconduct, and into aid that's more effective and has more support from both the sending country and the receiving country?
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Dr. Pinstrup-Andersen: The NGOs in general have been very effective in reaching poor people in spite of bad governments in many countries, and I think those NGOs should be supported. But there is a need for official foreign assistance, government-to-government assistance, and it seems to me that we coming from donor countries have the choice of picking the countries we trust will spend our money wisely. No developing country has a right to foreign assistance from Canada or Denmark. We can decide which governments we think will in fact not abuse our money. We can also put some pressures on those governments, although I think we have to be quite careful we don't try to solve their problems without fully understanding what the issues are in those countries.
Those are the things I would suggest. But I think the question of aid versus trade has to be taken with a considerable degree of skepticism, because the reason we now have so much trade with east and southeast Asia is that we were prepared to give them foreign assistance back in the 1960s and 1970s. That is paying off in trade.
I want to come back to what I started out with. I think appropriately allocated foreign assistance is an investment in, among other things, future export markets. The two link up nicely.
Dr. Petit: Support to agricultural research institutions in the developing countries, which very often are public institutions, is certainly a very legitimate thing to do.
The Co-Chairman (Mr. Graham): I will ask Mr. Vanclief, who is the chairman of the agriculture committee, if he could wind up the session.
The Co-Chairman (Mr. Vanclief): I want to thank the presenters this morning very much. First of all, I want to thank them for the contribution they have made to Canada's presentation at the coming World Food Summit. I know you've been consulted and certainly have added much to the Canadian presentation and comments that will be made there.
I have just a couple of comments on my own. As we know, the advances we've made in the last number of years in food production in the world have been based a lot on areal expansion - and we've had comments today that the area is not expanding, and is not able to expand, anywhere near as fast in the future as it has - and on the increase and intensity of the use of that land and yield increase. It has been said, and I want to echo it, that we cannot do what needs to be done with business as usual, so we are going to have to look at other things.
What has become very clear to me, as I've had the opportunity in the last few years to be in a few other parts of the world, not to anywhere near the extent many of you people have, I know... I'm concerned we're not doing enough in the area of water management. Having a farm background, I know you can have the best soil in the world, but unless there's water on it it makes no sense at all.
I remember being in a site in Zimbabwe where we literally drove through what as a Canadian I would call desert. The soil was like this floor in front of us. But six inches away the peas were as high as the table we're all sitting behind right now. It showed the basic fertility was there.
So we have to do an awful lot more there. When we do that, we know the production of small producers in those countries... We know it's like all agricultural products, they're perishable and the margins are incredibly small. But under the pressure of the perishability of a hundred pounds of tomatoes a Zimbabwean lady might have, or the peas she might have, she has to sell them; and then there's the downward pressure.
In all reality, the margins are not likely going to get bigger. In many cases the only way you can counteract that is to be able to have more. So trade is important, yes, and aid is important, but unless we have production... And all that has to be done with resource and environmental sustainability being kept up.
It's a thing I have. I don't think I'm wrong. We talk about the advantages of biotechnology and we talk about plant breeding, but we see that simply because of lack of water, that production is not there. We can't create water. We know that. But what are we doing - I'm reaching here - on desalinization? I know that's expensive, but there's no such thing as a crazy idea any more.
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I thank you very much for your comments this morning. I think you've stirred us all to continue to think here.
I want to close. I try to close every time with groups that don't understand the importance of agriculture.
This has already been mentioned by someone earlier. I've been talking about agriculture since I was a 4-H Club member, which was back when I was 12, many years ago. It has been mentioned here this morning that ``as goes agriculture, so goes the economy of a country''. We can pick just about any country in the world, with the exception of one or two. When we get that in place, then everything else can happen.
There are a lot of challenges out there, fiscal and otherwise. What can we do as Canadians? We can support the groups meeting the fiscal challenges we have - yes, within Canada - support groups like yours, and by influence I think we can make a difference. But it is a big challenge for all of us.
Again, thank you very much for coming before us today.
The Co-Chairman Graham: Thank you.
The next meeting of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade will be on Thursday morning at 9 a.m.
The meeting is adjourned.