Research and development at risk | Canola council official doesn’t see existing regulations as overly cumbersome
VANCOUVER — Canada is taking steps to ensure agricultural innovation continues to take place in this country.
“The regulatory climate has simply got to be more business friendly,” Greg Meredith, assistant deputy minister for strategic policy at Agriculture Canada, told delegates attending the Canola Council of Canada’s annual convention.
That doesn’t mean getting rid of regulations, he said, but the process needs to become faster and more transparent.
“Our colleagues in Health Canada and CFIA (Canadian Food Inspection Agency) are devoting an enormous amount of time and effort to really rethink and do it smarter,” he said.
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“It’s not about less regulation necessarily but smarter regulation.”
Pat Van Osch, past chair of the Canola Council of Canada, doesn’t see existing regulations as overly cumbersome.
“In the canola industry, the regulatory approval of new technologies and new traits has not been a limiting factor that is holding us back in moving innovation forward,” he said in an interview at the convention.
However, Meredith stressed that Canada can’t rest on its laurels because other countries have more efficient regulatory systems.
“That’s where the research and development is going to take place,” he said.
“That’s where the commercialization of these new inputs is going to take place.”
Meredith said technological innovation is the key to addressing declining annual growth rates for coarse grain and wheat yields, which are expected to drop below one percent per year between 2010 and 2020.
“You can’t compete with yields like that. The only solution to that really is technology,” he said.
Meredith worries about the proliferation of non-science based hysteria surrounding food technology, a prime example being the pink slime scandal.
At the heart of the scandal was an innovative technology that created safe food out of beef processing scraps, he said. Beef was separated from the fat in the scraps and treated with ammonia gas to eliminate any pathogens.
Beef Product Inc. (BPI) created a revenue stream from a waste product using a technology deemed safe by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The company’s lean finely textured beef was a success for 10 years until the phrase “pink slime” was popularized by celebrity chef Jamie Oliver and in a series of stories by ABC News.
Public backlash against pink slime caused McDonald’s and other food companies to stop using the product. BPI was soon forced to close three of its production plants.
“Within a couple of months, virtually every large food retailer swore off this particular ingredient,” said Meredith.
BPI is suing ABC News for more than $1 billion in damages, alleging that the television station and others launched a “concerted disinformation campaign” that has led to a decline in sales to less than two million pounds per week of the beef product from five million pounds before the scandal.
Meredith said its just one example of how quickly a safe food technology can be deemed unsafe in the eyes of the public. It emphasizes the need for an ongoing commitment to a science-based approach for regulation of food products.
He said another role for the government is promoting the development of low level presence (LLP) policies around the world, which would prevent the rejection of grain shipments containing trace amounts of unapproved genetically modified traits.
Meredith said Agriculture Canada is doing “a lot of work” on the intellectual property protection and LLP files while colleagues at Health Canada and CFIA are streamlining regulations.
However, he worries that Canada is rapidly falling behind emerging economies such as China, Brazil, and India, where there is heavy investment in agricultural research and development.
Meanwhile, private sector investment in Canada has languished since 2000, while investment in the food processing sector has been flat for decades.
“We’re not investing enough to keep up with the rest of the world,” said Meredith.
He stressed the need for effective research partnerships between universities, governments and the private sector.
Canada could see reduced investment from seed technology companies if it can’t keep pace with technological development by creating the appropriate regulatory environment and intellectual property protection, he said.
BASF recently relocated its crop science division to the United States from the European Union because of a poor climate for business investment.
“I don’t know if that’s a trend, but I know that it’s a fact, and I think that Canada is in a situation now where we can vastly improve our intellectual property protection and our regulatory environment,” said Meredith.
