Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Agriculture and Forestry
Issue No. 38 - Evidence - Meeting of November 2, 2017
OTTAWA, Thursday, November 2, 2017
The Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry met this day at 9 a.m. to continue its study on the potential impact of the effects of climate change on the agriculture, agri-food and forestry sectors.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: Welcome to this meeting of the Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry. I am Senator Ghislain Maltais from Quebec, and I will preside over the meeting today. Before we begin, I invite the senators to introduce themselves, starting on my right.
[English]
Senator Griffin: I am Diane Griffin, senator from Prince Edward Island.
Senator Doyle: Norman Doyle, Newfoundland and Labrador.
Senator Oh: Victor Oh, Ontario.
[Translation]
Senator Petitclerc: Chantal Petitclerc from Quebec.
[English]
Senator Bernard: Wanda Thomas Bernard, Nova Scotia.
Senator Woo: Yuen Pau Woo, British Columbia.
[Translation]
Senator Pratte: André Pratte from Quebec.
Senator Gagné: Raymonde Gagné from Manitoba.
Senator Tardif: Claudette Tardif from Alberta.
[English]
Senator Maltais: Today we will hear from Mr. Evan Fraser, Canada Research Chair in Global Food Security, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Guelph.
Welcome, Mr. Fraser. Thank you for accepting our invitation. I would ask you to make your presentation.
Evan Fraser, Canada Research Chair in Global Food Security, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Guelph, as an individual: Thank you very much for this extremely exciting opportunity.
I have three key messages for you today with regard to climate change and agriculture.
First, I would urge you to embark on policies that enable farmers to adapt to changing environmental conditions. The tremendous amount of research I’ve been involved in shows that in some cases farmers can be very adaptable and deal with huge changes in rainfall and precipitation, while in other cases agricultural systems can be very sensitive to even slight perturbations. I think there is a real important role for government to create incentives to promote resilience.
Let me expand on this with a personal anecdote. My family farm in Niagara when I was a teenager had a bad drought. In that year, the soil became dry and crumbly and the sweet corn began to fall over because the roots couldn’t hold on. My grandfather and I dragged irrigation pipes around the farm and actually worked our way through each plant with our feet or a hoe, buttressing each plant with a little hill of soil. When I returned to the farm to help grandpa harvest, I was amazed that our yields were fine that year. We were resilient and we had adapted.
Ten years later, however, a similar drought hit the farm. I was working on my graduate degree at the University of Toronto and by then grandpa was in his late 80s. That year, when the corn crop fell over, there was nobody there to pick it up. We had no harvest and no resilience.
For me, this little anecdote illustrates that the way farmers can react to make a huge difference in terms of whether a problem like a drought — in other words, climate change — is a big deal or not.
Luckily there are a lot of ways that policy makers can help improve the resilience in the face of extreme weather conditions. For instance, we can incentivize breeding programs both for our crops and for our livestock that promote heat tolerance, drought tolerance or pest tolerance. For instance, my colleague Bonnie Millard won a Governor General’s Award for innovation for her work breeding dairy cows. Right now, Bonnie is working to identify cows with an ability to tolerate hot, dry conditions, and will then use advanced genomics technologies to bring those traits into our herds.
However, for much of the 20th century our breeding programs have focused on simply boosting yields at the exclusion of trade, such as resilience. By shifting government funding programs to support research into climate-resilient crops and livestock, and then by engaging in public-private partnerships with input suppliers, we can provide farms with the genetic tools they need to adapt. Similarly, we can also create incentives for farmers to use more agri-ecological principles that will help improve resilience as well.
Creating incentives to encourage crop rotation or conservation practices help because these practices build up the organic matter in our soils. This is important because organic matter acts like a sponge, trapping water when it’s abundant and saving it for when it’s needed.
For instance, I’m aware of some former tobacco fields in Ontario that are now planted to perennial wildflower mixes. They provide pollinator habitat; build up the soil’s organic matter; help provide a steady stream of high quality beef for Ontario consumers; and are proven to be resilient and productive, even in the face of very little rainfall. Farmers have to be given an incentive to switch, in the case I’m thinking of, from tobacco to these other systems. The program I’m thinking of is funded by the Weston Foundation and provides $150 per hectare cash to farmers for making this switch. This is the sort of very specific policy measure that can be done.
My first message to you is to urge the committee to adopt policies that will improve both genetic resilience as well as agri-ecological resilience of our farms.
My second point is to reflect on how climate change may create opportunities in Canada’s North. We all know the climate is warming. This will probably make agriculture less viable in tropical regions, but it will probably benefit, at least in the next 100 years, Canadian northern areas. We call these agricultural frontiers, areas that aren’t currently cultivated but that could become suitable in the future.
I know the idea of developing frontiers has caught the interest of some of our territorial governments as well as some industries, but I need to raise a cautionary note here. Our northern soils are very fragile and are huge reservoirs of carbon. Some work I’ve been involved in suggests that if we start seriously cultivating northern soils, we will create huge new carbon emissions that will destroy Canada’s ability to meet our Paris accord commitments. This doesn’t mean that agriculture can’t happen. It means we have to be creative about it. Maybe, instead of thinking about wheat fields or soybean fields in the North, we should think about extensive bison or caribou production that is then deliberately marketed to international discriminating markets.
My second point for you today is to urge you to engage or consider engaging in a consultative and participatory process with indigenous and northern communities, and to imagine what kinds of food could be sustainably produced in a culturally appropriate way as the North warms.
My third and final message for you today pertains to the opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the Canadian sector using technology. Agriculture, as you may know, is on the cusp of a digital revolution. The same technologies that produced the Internet and are revolutionizing medicine are being applied to our farms. These technologies, which include smart tractors that know where they are in the field, plant the right seed in the right place and give it the right amount of fertilizer with no waste, are sometimes called Agriculture 4.0. They give us the opportunity to produce more food with fewer greenhouse gas emissions. Since agriculture is responsible for a third of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, this is really important.
At the moment, however, Ag 4.0 is in its infancy, both in Canada and internationally. For instance, it requires huge amounts of data to be integrated. That smart tractor needs to take soil maps, needs to integrate with Environment Canada weather station data, and needs to take remote sensing data from our satellites and bring it all together. At the moment this sort of data integration isn’t happening. As a result, we as a global society as well as a country are not realizing the potential of these new technologies. I think, however, this represents an ideal opportunity for Canada to show leadership.
My third recommendation for you is to urge the federal government to consider developing protocols pertaining to data sharing, cybersecurity, data ownership and data integration that would apply across the entire agri-food sector and make Canada a leader in developing and applying the technologies that will allow us to produce more food with fewer greenhouse gas emissions.
I’d like to conclude at this moment by saying that I believe there is a golden moment and a golden opportunity here for Canadian agriculture. This opportunity was recognized by Dominic Barton in his report from the Advisory Council on Economic Growth earlier this year.
With the kinds of recommendations I’ve tried to outline in this brief talk, I believe the Canadian farm sector will not only be become more adaptable to climate change and extreme weather but will also reduce its greenhouse gas emissions and build new export markets by demonstrating to our trading partners that our food is the most sustainably produced in the world, thereby establishing a brand Canada. Similarly, I think we can develop secondary markets to sell climate-friendly agricultural technologies to our trading partners.
In absolute conclusion, although climate change presents real challenges in terms of maintaining global food security, with the sorts of proposals that I’ve outlined I’m quite confident that the Canadian agri-food sector will be able to take advantage of our unique opportunity and our unique position, by which I mean our abundant land, water and sophisticated workforce. I really think we’re set to become the world’s most important contributor of sustainably produced food in years to come.
Thank you very much for listening. I’m happy to take your questions now.
Senator Maltais: Thank you very much, Mr. Fraser, for your presentation.
Senator Doyle: Thank you for your great presentation. Our committee recently did a tour. We went to Quebec and to Nova Scotia. I remember one individual in particular from Memorial University who made a presentation to us. Her name was Dr. Gabriela Sabau. She made the point that we waste an awful lot of food in our country. She said approximately 1.1 million Canadians, a lot of children and indigenous people, are presently experiencing food insecurity. She made the point that wastage in Canada is up in the area of about $30 billion a year in food.
Do you have any comments on how that wastage affects our environment? Would the new technologies you’re talking about help in any way in the future to reduce the amount of waste that we currently see in the food area in Canada?
Mr. Fraser: Thank you for an excellent set of comments, Senator Doyle, and some interesting questions.
As a quick background in terms of statistics, about a third of the world’s food is wasted. That figure holds true, more or less, for Canada. In Canada most of the food waste happens at the consumer and retail ends. It is not surprising that typically it is perishable products such as produce, meat, cheese and things like that. It’s a very different story in the global south, and we can talk about that, if you want, but that’s the situation in Canada.
At the same time, about one in seven Canadians is recognized as food insecure at some point during the year, and it’s about one in five or one in six children. As you go into Canada’s North, that jumps to about half or a little more than half of the population. We have a very serious food insecurity problem and a very serious food waste problem.
It’s difficult to think, however, that the food waste that happens in my fridge because I didn’t eat that kale fast enough could ever really address the food insecurity problem. It’s useful to think of food waste and food insecurity in Canada as actually two very different problems, although they are related and they do share some similarities.
Reducing food waste will have massive environmental benefits. The thought that we waste a third of the world’s food is terrible in and of itself because most of that ends up, in enlightened municipalities, in municipal composting systems, but for much of the country it simply ends up in landfill where it decomposes often anaerobically in the absence of oxygen. When you get vegetable waste decomposing anaerobically you get methane, which is a very potent greenhouse gas. Reducing food waste in Canada will have significant impacts on our climate change greenhouse gas emissions both through avoiding the decomposing of food waste and not be needing to buy and produce as much food because we will be using more of it. That’s where the real benefit is in terms of reducing food waste.
In terms of technologies, yes, technologies will help us reduce food waste. If you accept that food waste is happening mostly at the consumer end in Canada, I have colleagues working on smart packaging which will extend shelf life, optical systems, light-based systems and infrared-based systems, and which will help extend shelf life for perishable vegetables and things like that.
Even things like supply chain logistics, where we’re moving food more efficiently around, will be another way by which we reduce waste. There’s a huge amount of innovation happening right now at the food processing and retail end of the food value chain, that farm-to-fork chain, which will really help reduce our food waste. It also requires a lot of consumer behaviour to change food waste, because that’s where the food waste is really happening in Canada.
Senator Maltais: On the same subject, Senator Bernard has a supplementary question. We’ll come back to you, Senator Doyle.
Senator Bernard: I have a supplemental toSenator Doyle’s question and your response around food waste.
I wonder if you would have any recommendations around policies that municipalities and provinces, or even national policies, that could address issues of food waste and help with issues around food insecurity.
Mr. Fraser: In terms of food waste there is a number of very obvious policy measures that I think can be embarked on. First is changing our notion of best before dates. Best before dates are often simply an arbitrary signal that things may become less fresh after a certain date, but consumers typically assume a best before date means they become dangerous to consume after that date.
A huge amount of food waste in Canada is driven by this best before thing. There’s an obvious policy fix in terms of actually expressing what a best before date is and actually not being quite so conservative about that. In working with CFIA, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, where food actually becomes dangerous to eat beyond a certain date is very different from a box of crackers that has a six-week best before date on it. If you eat it seven weeks later, it really doesn’t make any difference. There’s a lot of stuff we can do from on a policy level around best before dates.
There are things we can absolutely do from an educational and consumer behaviour perspective such as educational programs in schools. This has been a topic of conversation with regard to the development of the national food policy. I’ve been involved in a number of conversations over the last six months with that. I think consumer education absolutely has to play a role.
A third obvious area to reduce food waste for Canada would be the cosmetic standards associated with our vegetables. A tremendous amount of food that is completely edible ends up getting thrown away because it fails to meet cosmetic standards. Certainly Loblaws, for instance, is moving to address that with their far from perfect line, where they have funny shaped carrots and slightly misshapen mushrooms. We can go a lot further in changing our cosmetic standards so that we don’t end up disposing of perfectly good food.
Those are all perfectly good ways of reducing food waste which I think will have significant environmental benefits. I have a harder time, Senator Bernard, imagining how to reduce food waste in a way that helps food insecurity. Certainly France, for instance, has tried to mandate that companies simply can’t throw food away. They have to donate it to food banks. That’s a perfectly good strategy.
As I was harkening in my previous answer to Senator Doyle’s question, food insecurity in Canada is driven by economic and social issues such as poverty, marginalization, gender-related issues, indigenous issues, and the role of single mothers. These are the drivers of food insecurity in Canada. It’s not that we don’t have enough food. It’s that people who are food insecure can’t actually access food.
We could do short-term, Band-Aid type solutions by directing food waste into food banks. I know of a number of programs that are doing that. That’s laudable, but that will in no way address the root causes of food insecurity in Canada, which have to do with social policy.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: Before we continue, I would ask senators to ask questions that are short and to the point, and I would ask our guest to give answers that are short and to the point. Many of us this morning want to ask questions, and everyone has to have the chance to do so.
[English]
Senator Griffin: Thank you for being here today via video conference.
I’m from a province where agriculture is the number one industry. Within that, of course, potato production is the number one crop. It’s great in many ways, but the problem with potato production is that it requires a lot of input, such as a lot of fertilizer and pesticides, otherwise known as crop protectants.
You mentioned one thing that I found intriguing, that is, ways to have incentives to promote resilience and adaptability. The Prince Edward Island government has been doing that on its level, but it also has regulatory instruments it has used examples like crop rotation, mandatory buy legislation and not growing potatoes on slopes greater than 9 per cent.
Because the federal government has two kinds of instruments at its control, one being regulatory and the other being financial, I’d like you to tell me if you’ve given any thought to regulatory things that the federal government could do to achieve the goals of sustainable agriculture.
Mr. Fraser: That’s a wonderful question, Senator Griffin.
I come from a bit of a farming background myself. I’m aware, as we all are, that farmers don’t like to be regulated. I haven’t seen as many regulatory measures work effectively in the farm sector as financial. In general, my reading of the literature is that financial incentives are more effective at getting the outcomes we want than regulation, but if the financial incentives aren’t working, then absolutely regulatory procedures are necessary.
I can think of a few. Ontario has the Environmental Farm Management Plan. It’s a voluntary program but it’s a regulation-based system. Certainly some of the big retailers and big processors are using corporate governance to establish regulations. If A&W wants a supply for beef, for instance, you have to be certified in a certain way that doesn’t involve antibiotics. That’s a corporate regulatory system in place.
For it to be really effective, they have to be linked with some sort of financial incentive as well. That’s how A&W does it. If you want to play ball with A&W, you have to meet their regulations. That’s something the corporate sector has that the government doesn’t necessarily have.
There are a lot of examples and I’d be happy, Senator Griffin, to engage with you directly on that, if you want, but I’m trying to be succinct.
Senator Griffin: I’ll follow the chairman’s rule and I’ll do the same. Thank you.
Senator Woo: Thank you, Professor Fraser. I want to pick up on your point about data revolution and the need for data integration across a variety of sources, platforms and data types. I’m wondering how this can happen and what incentives can put in place for it to happen.
First of all, can you give us the lay of land as to how disparate the resources are? I suspect they are disparate, and my guess is that it is quite difficult to bring them together.
How would we make that happen? Is this a public/private partnership? Is this a private initiative, or are we to rely on government to do this?
Your thoughts, please.
Mr. Fraser: This is an absolutely wonderful question and something I’m spending a lot of time thinking about right now.
You’re absolutely right. The data sources are disparate and very complicated. This will not come out of the public sector alone. It has been to be a public/private arrangement.
For instance, two-thirds of Canada’s dairy farms are milked by robotic milkers, which is an extremely sophisticated kind of technology. It’s very data heavy, very data rich. There are two companies that run the robotic milkers, DeLaval and Lely. The data cannot be pooled and integrated between those two.
Another trivial example that’s not trivial at all is if a farmer has a John Deere harvester and a Case fertilizer, it is almost impossible to integrate the data from those two systems which are working on the same field. If we are to realize the potential of this digital agriculture revolution, we have to move forward on this. I do not think the private sector has the incentives or capability of doing this on their own. Case and John Deere don’t have an incentive. They want to own the data themselves, to be quite honest. That is my interpretation of the situation.
I’ve been talking to Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. We’re trying to take a leadership role on this at the University of Guelph in order to help catalyze a public/private partnership that will create the data standards, cybersecurity, interoperability, and all that galaxy of integrated topics which will lead to that.
If we can show leadership nationally, we will be a global leader in that because every country and every jurisdiction in the world is grappling with this issue right now.
Senator Woo: What incentives do you need at the University of Guelph in order to move forward on this pilot project?
Mr. Fraser: Funding is the obvious one and the mandate to establish the regulations of interoperability. We actually need the regulations.
Getting back to Senator Griffin’s point, this is an area where regulation is probably vital and necessary. We have to say, “If you’re going to be collecting data, it has to be collected in a certain way and format. Here are the governance and ownership laws and here is the repository where it’s going to be stored.”
All the little bits are there, but we haven’t had a single body given the mandate to actually execute that. That’s the mandate the Arrell Food Institute, which I direct at the University of Guelph, would very much like to have. We’ve started a pilot project with IBM and Soybeans Canada to show a proof of concept on this. We’re working next week on that. We’re really at its infancy and are looking to the federal government for help on this.
Senator Tardif: Thank you, Professor Fraser, for a very interesting and informative presentation. I was struck by your comment that farmers are drowning under data and that a big data revolution will be occurring in agriculture. Some witnesses that we’ve heard from, though, have indicated that there is an insufficient amount of data, especially in the area of soil mapping, for example, and that they need more research to be carried out to help farmers mitigate the effects of climate change.
How do you see the situation?
Mr. Fraser: That’s a great question. Without having heard the previous witnesses’ comments on this, my sense is that farmers have access to a huge amount of data but they don’t have access to a way of interpreting the data.
For instance, a group of farmers that I’m working with, they have yield monitors. Essentially, as the harvester moves through the field harvesting, say a soybean crop, every three seconds it measures how much it has collected, its moisture content and maybe its protein content. You’re getting data every three seconds off a yield monitor.
If you do that once a year for 10 years, you will have millions of data points sitting on the hard drive in the dashboard of your car. Maybe you save it on to a memory stick and throw it into the ashtray of your pickup truck. Then, what do you do with it? Farmers are left asking the question, “What do I do with all this data?” It’s at the farm level they’re drowning in data.
In terms of data on the broader ecosystem they’re working in, we don’t have enough data, probably. We have okay soil maps, but they’re not great. In order to make sense of the yield data we need to link it to the soil data.
Environment Canada has pretty good data about weather and things like that. Increasingly with our partnerships with the Canadian Space Agency and NASA, we’re getting better and better remote sensing data. That’s good, but there’s still a lot of research to be done bringing all this together, calibrating the data and things of that nature.
For me, the bottleneck or the logjam is in the data interpretation and utilizing the data we already have. I’m also cognizant that probably at the soils level, in particular, in terms of biodiversity we actually don’t have much data. In terms of hydrology, metrology, land use, remote sensing and harvest, we have lots, in my opinion.
Senator Tardif: I’ll leave it at that for now. Thank you.
Mr. Fraser: Thank you very much.
Senator Petitclerc: Thank you very much for your presentation. I am going in the same direction as the last two senators but maybe a little more on technology.
The reason I want to talk about this is that your third key message reminded me of nine years ago. This is anecdotal, but I was on a tour visiting 12 farms in Canada for a project and meeting with thousands of farmers. I remember that nine years ago technology and what you call Agriculture 4.0 was already a big topic. The importance of it was taught all across Canada.
The concern was there then, and what you’re telling us is the concern is still here today. It has not been addressed totally, for sure. You have talked about data quite a bit, but it makes me wonder if maybe there’s resistance.
Is there resistance from the farmers themselves, or do the challenges come from somewhere else? Especially when it comes to addressing climate change and greenhouse gas emissions, do you feel there is resistance?
Mr. Fraser: That is a great question, Senator Petitclerc. Thank you for that.
I have a little bit of background first. I would say we’ve seen takeoff of these technologies in the dairy sector. They’re the furthest ahead in the role of putting RFID tags in cows, robotic milkers. The RFID tag provides a very specific ration tailored to each individual animal. They are using accelerometers, fitbits for cows, to tell when a cow goes into the estrous cycle so that you don’t have to force ovulation with hormones. All these technologies are becoming widely adopted. I would say that the dairy industry is at the forefront.
The field horticulture industry, with the exception of the greenhouse industry, in my observation would be the furthest behind on this curve. All other sectors of the ag economy fit somewhere in between.
The latest Canadian census shows that there’s a rapid uptake of these technologies by farmers and that this has risen radically in the last 10 years. Some farmers, early adopters, used autosteering, self-driving tractors 10 years ago, but it was only a small percentage. Now it’s close to 100 per cent.
A bunch of things are going on. One is the turnover of farm equipment. You have to get rid of the old tractor before you can buy the new one. There’s a long time there. The age of farmers is significant. Older farmers tend to be less accepting of new technologies, and we have an old farm community. The average age of farmers now is in the late 50s.
As the younger generation is coming up, a bunch of things are changing for the good and for the bad. One of the things that’s changing is the acceptance of technology. There’s a slowness of picking up the pace on technology. It’s creating barriers, but it’s picking up quite quickly now.
There’s also the more significant issue that a large number of these technologies haven’t yet shown benefits to farmers. If a farmer can collect all this data but cannot use it, why would they bother getting excited about it? The dairy industry has seen real benefits from this, so they’ve adopted these technologies. The other industries haven’t seen the benefits. One of the reasons they haven’t seen the benefits is this issue of data integration. We simply haven’t made use of what we were getting.
Like I said, I’m not sure if we’re in the starting blocks or about to get to the starting blocks, although you’re right. These technologies have on some level been around for about 10 years or so.
Senator Oh: Thank you, professor, for your information. During my visit to a few farms in the Niagara area I heard from almost everyone that 30 years ago they knew exactly what the following day’s weather would be like, but today they don’t know due to extreme events.
For example, the overnight temperature dropped to below 0 degrees Celsius last Thursday all of a sudden. Sometimes they lost crops caused by sudden events. Now they deploy a wind machine developed by Professor Shaw of Brock University. That could help to save two-thirds of their crops.
My question is: Are there any more technologies today, besides the wind machine, that have been invented and can apply to farms or other crops across the country?
Mr. Fraser: That’s a great question. The technologies you’re talking about, these wind machines, they’re probably to keep the air moving around apples and soft fruit as their flowers are out. If they get hit by a frost when the flowers are out before they’ve been pollinated, you can lose the whole crop, which is essentially what happened in Ontario in 2012 to the apple industry. There was a really weirdly warm March. The apples all budded. Then we had a frost in April and about 90 per cent of Ontario’s apple harvest was destroyed.
Farmers adapted by putting up wind machines. I don’t know if this is anecdotal or not, but I heard of some farmers hiring helicopters to keep the air moving around vineyards in Niagara that year in order to keep the frost from damaging them.
It’s a really good point. There are lots of things that farmers can do to adapt. Certainly, in terms of late frost, anything you can do to move the air around is beneficial because then the buds won’t freeze.
Like I said in my comments, there’s a lot we can do at the genetic level to breed more drought, frost and pest-resistant crops and livestock.
I’ll talk a bit more about Bonnie Millard’s work. She has a tool where she can identify dairy and beef cows that are particularly resistant to hot, dry conditions. By using some fancy genomic tools she can bring those traits into our herds much faster than traditional animal breeding. Like I said, she won a Governor General’s Innovation Award this year for some of this work. It’s this sort of stuff that we need to move forward quickly on, Senator Oh, in order to prepare our systems for extreme weather.
Then the last thing I’ll say is creating incentives for things like crop rotation, and things like I was talking about with Senator Bernard and Senator Griffin earlier, will also help build up at the farm system level the farm’s ability to remain productive under weird weather conditions.
You’re right. Late frosts are devastating for the soft fruit industry, and we’ve had some bad years in recent memory because of this.
[Translation]
Senator Dagenais: My question is about changes in consumer behaviour. Professor, you know that grocers took action by no longer providing paper or plastic bags. Economically, it may be better for them than for the consumers who have to carry their groceries. It may have been an easy decision. However, what innovations could be offered to grocers at the moment so that there is better packaging and ways to preserve food products in order to prolong their shelf life, while being environmentally friendly?
[English]
Mr. Fraser: That is a great question, Senator Dagenais. It identifies one of the real tensions in the modern food system.
On one hand, using disposable plastic wrap for food packaging is very sanitary. My friends in food safety and the CFIA really love this stuff because it reduces issues of foodborne ailments, but it creates a huge non-biodegradable waste stream.
There are a few things that I think can happen. First of all, there’s a consumer education piece to only use packaging when it’s an issue of safety and to use reusable packaging in all other cases. There are lots of regulations that can be used at an institutional level and educational programs that can be done in schools to move society toward a more nuanced or discriminating use of food packaging. Let’s get rid of the Ziploc bags and all get back to using Tupperware containers for our lunches. Stuff like that sounds trite, but it makes a big difference.
From an innovation and science perspective, there are two things that can happen. We can utilize what’s called smart packaging, which can be packaging with QR codes that actually tells the consumer the story of their food, when it needs to be eaten and the ways it needs to be handled. That’s starting to be done in the seafood industry in particular.
There’s also packaging that can actually absorb oxygen and keep products in a non-oxygenated environment for longer, which extend shelf life.
Then there’s a huge amount of work that I think needs to be done. Indeed I’m helping on some of that in terms of biodegradable plastics. We can establish and I think should take a leadership role in the biodegradable bioeconomy where we’re using unwanted organic matter and diverting waste streams into highly sanitary biodegradable plastics. I have some colleagues that I work with at the University of Guelph who are working on this.
For instance, our latest breakthrough was on a fully biodegradable coffee pod for these single-use coffee servings. We can debate whether single-use coffee servings is a good idea or not, but if you acknowledge that many people use them, thanks to the work done in the biodegradable plastics at the University of Guelph we now have a fully biodegradable coffee pod that is being sold at Loblaws. We can make progress in that sort of area.
[Translation]
Senator Dagenais: Thank you very much.
Senator Gagné: Mr. Fraser, thank you for your excellent presentation and your very interesting series of videos on food security. It was entertaining, while sending a strong message.
My question is about the importance of unpacking public policies on adaptation to climate change, policies that simultaneously concern food security, health, nutrition, demographics, underemployment, poverty, the economy and natural resources. What is being done to address the issue of climate change and all the related policies with a view to ensuring a transition to sustainable and climate-friendly food systems?
[English]
Mr. Fraser: That’s the subject of entire courses. Thank you for giving me that opening. If I were to distill my concerns down to a single item, we need to think creatively about how to apply a carbon price, whether it’s a tax or cap and trade program, to the food system. Agriculture is responsible for a third of the world’s greenhouse gas emission. As much as I love steak and ice cream, I acknowledge a huge amount of greenhouse gas emissions come out of the livestock industry.
There are a lot of low-carbon intensity sources of protein. I’m aware of a huge number of businesses and entrepreneurs who are in the process of setting up alternative protein companies: plant-based protein, insect-based protein and fungal-based protein. There’s a huge opportunity for innovation in providing consumers with low-carbon protein choices. We will create a wave of incentives for that innovation if we start paying the full cost of our food which requires us to pay a price for the carbon that is embodied in our food.
I encourage you to think creatively and seriously about what can be done to apply some sort of carbon pricing mechanism to our food system. That will have major ramifications for how the system operates. Those won’t be easy ramifications. There will be serious challenges and work to be done with industry to help bring people along. It’s not a short-term project. It’s a long-term project. For the future sustainability of the planet as well as our public health burden because our diets aren’t particularly healthy, we need to embark on this conversation.
Senator Bernard: I would like to take you back to your second recommendation around consultation with indigenous and northern communities.
First of all, are you aware of any such consultations happening now in the community, maybe with universities that are doing some of this work? Is there anything happening at the moment, or would this be new initiatives you’re talking about?
Mr. Fraser: Thank you for the chance to drill into that a bit more, Senator Bernard. I appreciate it. There are a number of consultations happening around indigenous food systems, absolutely. In some ways it’s embedded in the Truth and Reconciliation more implicitly than explicitly. For instance, British Columbia has a working group on indigenous food sovereignty. I had the chair of that program, Dawn Morrison, on campus just last week. We did a panel for CBC “Ideas” and Dawn was talking about that.
There’s a big food security group out of the Yukon that’s indigenous-led. I have interacted and been speaking with them. I have colleagues working with Inuit and indigenous communities in northern Quebec on what indigenous food systems might look like. There are a lot of one-offs. I characterize them as grassroots and not coordinated across the country.
This is where I get a little more concerned. At the same time there is a tremendous amount of interest being applied to this idea of cultivating the North. The Northwest Territories government just released a food and agricultural strategy which had a lot of excellent elements in it. It included this idea that we would cultivate significant amounts of land in the North. We have to be cautious about that. If we embark on widespread land conversion, turning the Boreal forest into soy fields in Northern Canada, we will have a massive carbon emissions problem on our hands. We need to be more creative and consultative with the First Nations and indigenous communities as we start thinking that the climate is changing but it also produces opportunities. Let’s make sure we do this properly. A bit of federal leadership would be helpful in this regard.
Senator Bernard: That’s very helpful to know. Are there any similar initiatives happening with Black communities in the east? In Nova Scotia, for example, there are 43 Black communities settled in the 1700s. Many of them survived because of subsistence farming. When the agriculture industry moved to be a more technological industry, they were locked out because of systemic racism. It is some of the worst land in the province, quite frankly. It’s a miracle that they survived.
There was an organization we heard from on this committee called perennia that has been doing work with the Black communities. They are based out of Truro, Nova Scotia. They’ve been trying to re-engage the Black community in the agricultural community as an industry. It seems to be very challenging. I don’t know if anyone else is looking at this. Many of those areas are considered food deserts and many people experience food insecurity because of the systemic issues you identified.
Is anyone across the country looking at what’s happening with the Black community in Nova Scotia in a similar kind of way as with the indigenous?
Mr. Fraser: That’s really interesting, Senator Bernard. The short answer to your question is no, I’m not aware of any groups working at a national level to try to create a synergy between, for lack of a more eloquent way of putting it, marginalized communities and food security in marginalized communities. Food Secure Canada would be very interested in that. They are a coalition of NGOs based out of Montreal. If anybody else was doing that at a national level it would be Diana Bronson, Executive Director of Food Secure Canada. Offline I would be happy to connect you with that and we could do some digging.
I was speaking with some members of the McCain family, the board of directors of the French fries company. Members of the family are involved in a community garden and community food literacy program based on the east coast. They were reaching out to the disenfranchised Black community on the East Coast. I had lunch on Sunday with Scott’s wife, Lesley McCain, who is running this program.
This was news to me, but obviously this was on the radar of some very wealthy east coast families.
Senator Bernard: Perhaps I’ll reach out to your office to get more information.
Mr. Fraser: I would be happy to chat.
Senator Pratte: I want to go back to this idea of carbon pricing which we’ve discussed with many of the witnesses who came in before us. Witnesses from the agriculture industry are very worried about carbon pricing being imposed on them, especially the producers who are export driven. They would rather be exempted from any form of carbon pricing, the idea being that they want to be competitive.
Do you think they have a point? If they want to be competitive with the U.S. market, should they be exempted? They are exempted or at least partially exempted from the carbon pricing system in B.C.
Mr. Fraser: Senator Pratte, you’re raising some wonderful issues, and there are no easy answers here. I would like to be very clear that we’re in a situation of significant tradeoffs and compromises, so everything I’m about to say has to be presaged with that.
I’m going to quote Michael McCain, CEO of Maple Leaf Foods, with whom I do a fair bit of work. He is reorienting Maple Leaf Foods toward a protein company and has said that the future is less meat but better meat. I hope I’m not misquoting Mr. McCain. I know him reasonably well, so I don’t think I am.
Similarly, I’m going to pick up on the key phrase from Dominic Barton’s Advisory Council on Economic Growth report from earlier this year that Canada should strive to become the world’s trusted supplier of safe, sustainable food.
I think we have a role to play and a decision to make. It’s not an either/or decision, but there’s momentum behind this decision. Do we want to be a producer of huge amounts of commodities that are sold indiscriminately, or do we want to aim to become what Dominic Barton says is the world’s trusted supplier of safe and sustainable?
In other words, can we establish a Canadian brand and develop export markets around a Canadian brand that isn’t just based on price? This is partly an ideological or strategic question. I hope I don’t come across as too naïve. I don’t think Barton and McCain are naïve when it comes to business, but they’re aware that a reorientation is required.
One of Ontario’s fastest growing export markets is for what’s called identity-preserved soybeans, which is a non-GMO soybean sold specifically to a very discriminating Japanese edamame markets, where the Canadian soy industry offers certain guarantees about how the product is produced, where it comes from, what its genetics are, what its management is, and how the food chain treats it. They’re being rewarded for this premium product.
We’re a big country and one-size-fits-all approaches do not apply. Exemptions may be necessary for certain sectors of the economy, or maybe exemptions for a period of time while transitions happen. I agree with McCain and Barton that our future is producing higher value-added products for discriminating markets that will pay a premium because our food is safe and sustainable. That means that we need to be trading on and demonstrating the validity of claims about carbon, animal welfare, soil, workers and labour, indigenous and food sovereignty. We need to be establishing brand Canada that speaks to these claims.
Senator Pratte: There will be a lot of work to do in getting the farming community on board with this.
Mr. Fraser: I agree with you, and I’ll say there will be a lot of champions in the emerging technologies and start-up sector who are champing at the bit to bring new alternative consumer products to consumers as well.
Let me repeat what I said at the beginning. These are tough transitions, with large numbers of tradeoffs and compromises. There’s no doubt in my mind that we are facing very challenging issues.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: Mr. Fraser, Canadian consumers feel that food processors and grocers do not have a specific plan to protect the environment. Let me give you a specific example. The use of paper bags was abolished because too many trees were being cut down. The paper bags were of good quality, as well as being biodegradable and recyclable. The paper was replaced by plastic, which comes from oil. Then, we realized that it made no sense. The plastic bags have been replaced by plasticized cotton bags. Now, plasticized cotton bags are said to be full of microbes. In addition, consumers are left with plasticized cotton bags filled with plastic. Almost all foods, vegetables, and so on, are wrapped in plastic. Consumers wonder what will happen with all that plastic, whereas 25 years ago, we used paper bags, which were biodegradable and recyclable. Plastic is a big problem when it comes to protecting the environment. It’s all very confusing for consumers. What can you say to consumers today?
[English]
Mr. Fraser: I appreciate the spirit of your comment. You are right that we as scientists have been poor, I would say, at engaging in useful public communication. This is a major challenge, no question at all.
In terms of Canadian consumers, I would say that we should be reducing wherever we can. In terms of food packaging, we should be reusing food packaging as much as possible.
There is some obvious guidance to consumers now about cloth bags. Especially if they’re used for more than six months, they use less energy than the equivalent number of plastic bags and they don’t accumulate. There’s some useful guidance to consumers. The retail markets of the Loblaws, the Sobeys, et cetera, have started to pick that up and to communicate it. I’m noticing a serious generational shift between my grandparents, my parents, myself and my children in terms of their reaction to and use of plastic bags, for instance.
I’m concerned, as we go down this road toward greater reusing and recycling of food packaging, that we don’t compromise food safety issues. I know that a lot of people at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and at the University of Guelph food safety labs are very worried about that. This is where there is a strong role for science and innovation to play in creating biodegradable plastic. For me, it’s a combination of reusable packaging mixed with biodegradable plastic for those things where food safety becomes an issue. If we could think creatively about a public communication strategy around those two principles, I would be very happy.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: Thank you very much, Mr. Fraser. The time is already up. It was very interesting. Thank you for taking the time to listen to us.
(The committee adjourned.)