Agriculture committee  Okay. Actually, I'm at the last sentence. I'll be happy to discuss “ag plus” or anything else I've mentioned. Thank you.

Agriculture committee  That's correct. Thank you for the invitation. First I have to confess that I had hernia surgery on Thursday and I'm on a lot of painkillers, so if my testimony is kind of loopy....

Agriculture committee  Actually, there are a lot of jokes here, because I've seen loopy discussions in the House of Commons--

Agriculture committee  The focus of my presentation will be on how to create Canadian jobs by expanding export markets internationally. As primary producers represent only 2% of Canada's jobs, I'm going to suggest not only that we should help Canadian ag producers directly but also that we should create new rural and urban jobs by combining agriculture with other sectors of the economy that could employ many more people, a strategy that I will call “ag plus”.

Agriculture committee  Could I just suggest that on the transparency issue, when Monsanto issues a patent, that's a public record. It's a very detailed, wonderful public record, and it's very rigorous. I would suggest that to improve transparency, that public record, that patent, should be linked to a database.

Agriculture committee  Yes.

Agriculture committee  What we have now that we didn't have 10 years ago is the entire genetic codes of many, many organisms—bacteria, plants, animals—so that we have a much better ability to take genes that we have a lot of information about from one organism to another. Because of that, the technology is going to explode.

Agriculture committee  My name is Manish Raizada and I'm an associate professor in the Department of Plant Agriculture, and I'm also the international relations officer. I was told in the early to mid-1990s that I might have been the first graduate student in the world to make GMO corn, and I'm a molecular geneticist.

Agriculture committee  Slow down?

Agriculture committee  Sure. I think both the relative risks and the benefits get blown out of proportion. The theme here is relative risk and relative benefit. I've broken the presentation down into a few topics today. Again, I want to bring in different perspectives. The first topic is ethics. I think what the population believes is that molecular geneticists are tinkering with nature; they're playing God.