Podcast: How does food policy affect food choices?

Clinton Monchuk: (00:07)
From Canadian Food Focus. This is Ask a Farmer. I’m your host Clinton Monchuk, a Saskatchewan farmer. In this podcast, we talk to food experts to answer your questions about your food.

Clinton Monchuk: (00:27)
Welcome to the podcast, everyone. Today what we’re going to be talking about is how food policy kind of affects our food choices. So for the most part, Canada has kept a very science-based approach when it comes to deciding on regulations and legislations on how food is grown in this country. But there’s a little bit of a concern now. We’re seeing a trend that’s happening in the European Union right now that looks to kind of have policy that’s going, maybe interfere a little bit with both the demand and the supply side of the equation. And it’s a little bit concerning. So the question comes up is, will food policy actually sway away from science? So today we have with us Bill Wirtz, who’s with the Consumer Choice Center, and he’s going to discuss a little bit more on how these policy changes affect what your food choices are, particularly in the European Union. So Bill, how are you doing today?

Bill Wirtz: (01:27)
Very well. Thank you for having me.

Clinton Monchuk: (01:29)
Just give a little bit of a background as to how you got into the position you’re in.

Bill Wirtz: (01:34)
Yes, gladly. It’s been a bit of a journey. My background is actually in broadcast journalism where, you know, you have to work yourself really into a topic fairly quickly. And I’ve been with Consumer Choice Center now for a while, and it was basically, we had all these issues that were slowly coming up, four or five years ago, nutritional labeling, common agricultural policy reform, all of these. But there was nobody really on staff that was really familiar with those topics. So I said, well, okay, let me take on the challenge and see what I can, what I can find out. So I worked myself into this issue. I don’t have a scientific background in it whatsoever. I’m from a farming family in the sense that my grandfather was a farmer, that I’m from the countryside in Luxembourg.

Bill Wirtz: (02:23)
And so I of course know a lot of farmers and, you know, have heard many stories about how they feel about the regulations and the direct payments, subsidy schemes, and all of those things. But outside of that, I’m not from that field. But what I notice is that a lot of things get sort of drowned in the complicated lingo of EU policymaking. And people tune it out very quickly, even though it’s such an important topic. And I think we’re going to get to that. As in the last few years, there’s been a lot more attention on agriculture, and justifiably so.

Clinton Monchuk: (02:57)
Give background what the Consumer Choice Center does, because I think this is key to this discussion because you’re experts in this field, in the European Union, and I think it’s great to have this expertise in terms of what you do.

Bill Wirtz: (03:13)
At Consumer Choice Center, we take a different approach to consumer issues in the sense that your usual consumer group in Europe is very old and federated and very entrenched in the way they operate. I don’t want to say old as a stigma, but you know, dusty, let’s say, in the way they operate. What we said, “dusty,” a couple of years ago, was that we wanted to bring an aspect to consumer issues that is more forward-looking, looking towards innovation, looking towards the coolest new digital consumer products, new ways of transportation and mobility that helps consumers improve their lives. Because what we saw is that the traditional consumer groups were the ones attending hearings in parliament, always looking for the next thing to ban with the expectation that everything that is new must thus be bad.

Bill Wirtz: (04:09)
So this technophobic type approach, this is not what we felt represented by. So, you know, we essentially organized our different issues, whether it’s energy policy, mobility, telecommunications, fast moving consumer goods, retail prices, all of these different issues that consumers are affected by every day. So that’s the approach we take. We talk to policy makers, we make media appearances, we speak at conferences, we meet politicians one-on-one to try and find a more innovation and consumer choice based approach to regulations; smart regulations. So we take a more lenient approach, let’s say, on whether everything should be heavily regulated.

Clinton Monchuk: (04:59)
So do you feel that consumer choices now have been limited as a result of some of these policies and regulations that are put in place?

Bill Wirtz: (05:09)
Yes, certainly. And I mean, all I have to do to see that myself is go to a grocery store in Canada or in the United States where the selection is much larger. I mean, the most significant example of something on food products is everything derived from genetic engineering. You can maybe get into detail on sort of that there might be changes on that, on that issue in the European Union compared to other places in the world. And that’s not just North America, it’s also, if I travel to Southeast Asia or East Asia. Europe prides itself on high food quality. And I think in many cases we do achieve that. But if you’re looking for variety, that’s not really what you get. And I think we find that out now in Europe when, you know, people are looking for products specific to, like, if they have specific allergies, if you’re looking for gluten-free, it’s gotten a lot better, but it’s still not really where it should be.

Bill Wirtz: (06:02)
Or whether, you know, you have a migration background and you’re trying to find your local products. Europe can be a bit complicated on that. Like, we don’t really have that. Culture usually is like, you move to this country, this is how you’re going to eat. We have very clear views on how you should eat. And it’s like if you move to Italy, you just follow the Mediterranean diet. So that diversity that you have elsewhere, it’s not really existing. And often, the regulatory system has helped, has made that possible. Sometimes, you know, on an EU level, we have regulation, but then also sometimes individual member states try to protect their own products. So that’s why beer will be expensive in France and in Germany, wine will be expensive because the local governments try to make rules and regulations that protect their own industry. Very often, regulations, whether it’s fiscal incentives or taxes or food standards, have really reduced the amount of choice that consumers have.

Clinton Monchuk: (06:59)
The Canadian government still takes a very science-based approach to a lot of the regulatory issues when it comes to food. But it seems in the European Union that’s starting to sway. I think you’ve already indicated it’s been swaying maybe for a little while, but why do you think those differences in policy making exist? Like, what’s the drive behind those policy makers to do that?

Bill Wirtz: (07:23)
How many hours do you have? I mean there’s several avenues. There’s several reasons why it is the way it unfortunately is. I mean, you have, when it comes to food, you have a certain anti-Americanism that exists. Like the idea that, especially in the United States, people just don’t know enough about food. Their food is just in worse quality than what we have. We Europeans, we make the best coffee– fair. That is true, we make better coffee, but… So, there’s some of that happening, where, you know, it’s like the idea that we just know better. And I mean, you would still hear this coming from the European Commission in Brussels, like, we have the highest food standards, we don’t apologize for it, and we’re going to keep having the highest food standards in the world. The idea that it’s a very Eurocentric view, we’ve got it right and all the others just need to follow us, and they’ll see why we’re right. So that’s, it’s a little bit of arrogance, a dash of arrogance that that goes in there, and anti-Americanism. But there’s also a big distrust on anything that is consolidated or of a large size. I mean, the average size of a farm in Europe is, I mean, considerably smaller than it would be in Canada or the United States. And, you know, even retail chains, some of them can be large, but even there, Europeans prefer to, to shop locally in their small shops. So there’s a lot of distress on anything that would be considered as like the term ‘factory farm’. Any farm that is the average size in Canada, a European would look at that and say, that’s a factory farm.

Bill Wirtz: (08:57)
Even though you can easily say that a lot of the economic hardship experienced by farmers in Europe is actually because of this lack of consolidation, and that maybe it would make sense for some local farmers to get together and you know, combine their businesses or at least run their businesses as one entity to simplify anything from their resource input that they need to purchase together or materials and so on. So there’s that going on. I mean, I’m not sure how much we want to include this, but I think the worst North American export, Greenpeace, is one of those organizations that has had a very strong foothold in European policymaking. And it has, I think it’s over 60 full-time lobbyists in Brussels from Greenpeace that do nothing but meet parliamentarians all day and give them brochures and information telling them that agriculture has a significant impact, negative impact on the climate objectives by the European Union. Therefore, something needs to be done. And all of that culminated in policy making that essentially blames European farming for all the problems in the climate policy that the EU tries to pursue. There are a lot of reasons there that go into it; I just wanted to name some, but we can get into it some more.

Clinton Monchuk: (10:14)
You’ve already indicated there’s a lot of factors in there that are influencing policymakers. And I don’t think that’s any different from influence that you would see in the lobby efforts in Ottawa or Washington. But at the end of the day, the government still follows a science-based approach like that, that is kind of the core of the existence of, say, the Food Inspection Agency here, and the US Department of Agriculture, that’s kind of at the core. If farmers aren’t limited on what they can grow or the productivity in terms of what they can grow, does that actually pose even a food security issue for the European Union down the road as well?

Bill Wirtz: (10:53)
Yeah. I mean, one part is technology, but one part is also the amount of land you even are allowed to use. I mean, it’s like one, we can talk about synthetic crop protection and how that’s been fairly limited in Europe. But also you have the set-aside policies, like how much you need to set aside from your farm, from your farmland for biodiversity users. You know, some of the policies wanted to cut another 10% of European farmland, and now suddenly we talk more about food security. And I think, I mean, the most significant trigger in that was the war in Ukraine and the shortage on fertilizers, which had a significant impact on how we talk about food security. And also where it comes from is that we were buying a of produce from Russia.

Bill Wirtz: (11:38)
And now that’s certainly declined. We’re also still buying a lot of, for instance, organic produce from Turkey, but there’s also geopolitical problems there. So we are looking to other ways to do it. And then there’s a lot of African trade partners, but many of those trade partners are not able to comply with EU food standards. So that’s another problem. So in terms of our own production, we’ve been sort of, we’ve been letting, letting our expectations down there. An example I like to give all the time, which also relates to crop protection. The regulation there, neonicotinoids were banned in the European Union in 2020, and the French beetroot farmers were complaining and saying, we need an exemption, because we are all about to go bankrupt. I mean, we have a significant amount of insects swarming us, and we don’t really have a good alternative.

Bill Wirtz: (12:35)
There was sulfoxaflor as an alternative, and then that got banned. So the regulators are very quick on banning chemicals. Then that ban on neonics was actually dropped for a period of three years. And then EFSA, the European Food Safety Authority was asked to do a reevaluation. And when EFSA doesn’t conclude that something is absolutely poisonous, then what happens is that the European Parliament investigates EFSA because then there must be industry interference if EFSA doesn’t find other things that the parliamentarians wanted. So it’s a mishmash of so many things where essentially there’s a lot of people who don’t want to admit that they may have gotten it wrong. And that’s, I mean, glyphosate is, I think, a good example of where everyone, all the European scientific advice tells policy makers, this is a safe product, the way it is used right now. It’s probably one of the best products even in terms of herbicides being used right now in Europe. But the political process doesn’t want to admit that. And then we have these last minute changes where one person has to raise their hand in the European Council, which represents the member states and say, no, let’s authorize it for another five years. I think we talk about sort of the American political system as being this breaking news drama and so on. We do the same thing with these last minute sort of policy changes in a very similar way with the same dramatic fashion. So agriculture has increasingly become a victim of that. And by result of that, consumers as well.

Clinton Monchuk: (14:16)
Can you give an example, and again, just to set some contexts for, because you have traveled all over, some examples of food that you would say here in the grocery stores, you have so many choices for a similar product, but in the EU you have one or two, right?

Bill Wirtz: (14:34)
Well, number one is I guess cereal, but that is, I think that’s more really cereal. I don’t think that’s necessarily regulatory. Well, there might be a regulatory reason for that. I’d have to look up sort of on the sugar content if there’s maybe a reason there. But I mean, that’s the first one that springs to mind because I think that’s in movies also, you see it so much. Like if you, and if Americans are visiting here for the first time and they go into a supermarket, they also say, oh, very limited on choices. So when it comes to, I mean, a lot of the super foods are the ones that I really noticed in different countries and in North America where I’m like, okay, this is really cool.

Clinton Monchuk: (15:16)
I know I ate the other day, and I don’t know how often they come in, but they’re, they’re called cotton candy grapes, and they’re grapes. They’re literally grapes, but they taste like cotton candy. They’re delicious.

Bill Wirtz: (15:30)
Incredible.

Clinton Monchuk: (15:31)
Nutritionally, they, they’re no different than any other grape, but the taste is, is unbelievable. Like, I love it, and every time I see it, I’ve got to buy it and kind of feel a little bad eating them because they taste so sweet, but they’re, it’s a grape.

Bill Wirtz: (15:45)
And you would also think that for a lot of those innovations, it would seem so obvious, if it’s essentially still, you know [nutritious], whether it’s a fruit or a vegetable, especially for children that are not getting their intake. And I mean, many of us, let’s say, are guilty of that. It’s such a innovative approach to it. And what is also very sad to see, for instance, on the whole genetic engineering file is that in Europe, we develop a lot of the different types. I mean, whether it’s different variations of gluten-free wheat, or nuts that don’t cause allergies to people who have nut allergies. I mean, these are universities in the Netherlands that work on these things, but they, none of it can be commercialized in the European Union because we have legislation dating back to 2001, which predates CRISPR-Cas9 to say that, well, this is Frankenfood and it’s evil, and it’s awful and we shouldn’t have it, and it will undermine our food system. All things that I mean, are not just unlikely. They’re also proven wrong because they exist in different jurisdictions in the world. And also GMOs do exist. For instance, where I am in right now in Portugal, BT maize is still grown. I mean, it’s a variety so old, they still have to beg different actors in the US to still deliver it because it’s such an old variety. But they still grow it. So everyone in Portugal who thinks that they’ve never eaten GMO most likely have. And, you know, Europeans visiting the US or Canada also are completely fine eating at a diner or going to a restaurant. They don’t even, they don’t think about it twice. Also, I think even more than the varieties is the prices.

Bill Wirtz: (17:33)
Europeans pay a lot for food. I mean, the pre-Covid number was 25%–for instance, in Romania, I mean, it’s worse. 25% of household consumer household spending goes to food. And that’s significant, that’s even gotten worse now. It’s like this idea, I mean, it’s, you know, Europe, it’s, it’s like a museum where everything’s very expensive in many, in many places. And the people who live in that museum can’t really afford it. And that’s unfortunate. I don’t want us to be remembered for that, to be known for that. We have beautiful old bridges and towers and beautiful things to see. But Europe also needs to remember that the way we got all those things was because we used to be innovative and forward looking. And I think we’ve kind of gotten stuck.

Clinton Monchuk: (18:25)
So this brings us in the time in the podcast for the fun farm fact. Did you know, by allowing new plant science innovations in the country of Canada, farmers have been able to adopt conventional and zero till practices? So this innovation that we have and we use in Canada, results in a reduced need for fuel. And it’s estimated between, or right around 1.2 billion liters of fuel has been reduced between the years of 1996 and 2018. So this was a report released from a firm called the Regulatory Impacts Alternative Strategies. Now, it’s interesting because this is one of those examples. I farm, and we adopt new technologies every year, right? Like there’s something new that comes out every year. But this is one of those technologies that actually has a huge impact on benefiting the environment.

Clinton Monchuk: (19:21)
And it has to do with us having the ability to use a non-selective herbicide like glyphosate, Roundup, right? So if we don’t have access to that product, all of a sudden, we’ve got to till our land and it costs more money to buy fuel. I’m burning more fuel. But not only that, it’s not sinking that carbon back into the soil to benefit the environment. So it’s a weird mix with this policy, right Bill? Where you’re like, well, we are doing what’s good for the environment, and you’re trying to actually ban that. It’s a tough one. But anyways, your thoughts around that.

Bill Wirtz: (19:58)
Oh, I absolutely agree. And I mean, the amount of times I’ve been in offices of politicians where we went through this, it just blows my mind at this point. Like how often, I’ve gone over this and also the amount of places where I speak on a panel. And the question will always be, well, if we have to decide between making it more environmentally sustainable and making it cheaper for consumers, which one do we have to pick as if it was it has to be one or the other. The most emblematic of that was when the Farm to Fork strategy was unveiled by the Commission in charge in European parliament. He said, we have gotten used as Europeans to food being too cheap.

Clinton Monchuk: (20:44)
Wow.

Bill Wirtz: (20:44)
And in order for it to be more sustainable, it will have to increase in cost. And I think that is so telling because they don’t realize that you can have it both ways, because we’ve already done that. We’ve reached peak agricultural land use in the early 2000s. I mean, according to the available data, and I think there were three or four meta studies that did look through this, we make more food with less land. So we’ve already achieved higher productivity through best practices, through modern technology. And essentially what we should be looking at is doing more of the same in that sense of getting better at using those resources. Because ultimately, no farmer wants to use more diesel for tractors. It’s like, there is the evil farmer with the top hat and a cigar, laughing about how he subjugated the world today.

Bill Wirtz: (21:40)
These kind of stereotypes and misinformed ways in which agriculture has been talked about in the last few years has really come to haunt us through regulation, often made by people that, I mean, they don’t really understand how it works. I mean, you have a certain set of farmers that sit, for instance on the European Parliament’s Agriculture Committee. But that number is actually being reduced each year. Like people who never had any experience in that whatsoever who make those rules. And I’m not saying you can’t talk about it if you don’t have experience in it. I’ve never been a farmer, but I’m very careful with new rules because I want to hear firsthand from a farmer how it impacts them. And yes, there’s farmers who make very different choices. I mean, some farmers have production methods that are completely different from others. But having that variety of availability should be there. And, no-till is unfortunately one of those things that is considered to be more prevalent in North America than it is in Europe. And that’s a drain on the environment.

Clinton Monchuk: (22:44)
Let’s talk a little bit more about this. So if you see–and we’re already starting to see some of these proposed changes that are coming, and some of the changes have already been made in regulation legislation in the European Union, but this last probably six to maybe 12 months–we’ve seen farmers get up and say, okay, enough is enough. So farmers are clearly upset with this and some of the proposed policies coming to them. So why should consumers care about this?

Bill Wirtz: (23:15)
So it’s a lot of different sets of regulations that come together. It all starts with the environmental ambitions that start with the Paris Climate Accord in 2015. And then the European Union made a commitment of having emissions set at a certain level, and it made it compulsory for all member states of the EU to not overstep that level. Now, for some countries, that meant that they were going to have to pay fines if they didn’t bring those emissions down. So all, global warming driving emissions that would be counted in that, not just CO2, but also nitrous oxide, methane, all of those go into it. And so, for instance, the Netherlands looked at their balance sheet and said, okay, this is really difficult for us to achieve. We could halt all construction or close all the airports, but those are not really good viable options.

Bill Wirtz: (24:05)
But what we can do is we could get rid of about a third of our livestock farmers. But of course, how could you possibly do that? So the Netherlands suggested this farm buyback program where the government was going to reimburse you for your farm, and then you could end your profession and you would have enough resources to either choose a different profession or maybe even retire early. But very few farmers took that deal. Very few were interested. And when one minister suggested that because so few farmers were interested in this deal, it might be made compulsory. That’s when the protest started, because essentially: we’re going to take your farm away, literally take your farm away. That felt very personal to a lot of people, you know for whom that is family tradition. Especially in Europe, I mean, it can be an incredibly long ranging tradition, with the same land for centuries that your family’s been working on. And, imagining that for a policy that the government only found out about four or five years ago that it wants to implement it, or now it feels serious about it because it feels that this is a good way of getting reelected. Having that being taken away from you, that is very personal to a lot of farmers. You have German farmers that were upset over the fact that diesel prices were being increased for tractors and tractor prices altogether, because the government, said this was an emissions problem, but ultimately they were looking for billions more euros to plug a deficit hole in their budget.

Bill Wirtz: (25:41)
And they thought they could get away with this one. In France, it was badly organized negotiations with retail chains where the government in the preparation for an election campaign said, okay, inflation’s too high, we’ve got to bring it down. They went to the retailers and said, okay, retailers bring the prices down. And the retailers said, of course, government, we can do that. We’ll bring the prices down. And of course, nobody thought about the fact that, you know, farmers were just going to get less for their produce. So it’s a lot of different policies that essentially all narrowed down to EU policy being so misinformed. It’s an environmental agenda that while very well intentioned–I very rarely want to prescribe bad intentions to people–very well intentioned, but really not informed. And we knew this because the main policy, Farm to Fork, it didn’t have an impact assessment by the European Commission.

Bill Wirtz: (26:39)
The European Commission didn’t want to tell us what was going to happen if we implemented all of these policies. But then USDA did. The USDA ran it through a model and said, okay, this is what’s going to happen. And it was going to bring production levels down 7 to 12%, reduce most EU countries’ GDP, reduce its trade capacity, and make food more expensive. I mean, all of these things were in the cards. And that was very reckless because it didn’t take consumers into account. It didn’t take the businesses associated into account. It didn’t take the farmers into account.

Clinton Monchuk: (27:14)
Do you have any numbers or have you done any assessment to say that if some of these policies that are kind of going through the system, if they get approved, and the case in point, if you are mandated to have X amount of acres as say, organic in a country, what would that mean to the price of food for the average consumer in the European Union?

Bill Wirtz: (27:36)
That is a question I always dread getting asked because it’s so difficult to answer. Because it is incredibly difficult. Essentially the question narrows down to what is the real price of food? That’s the whole conversation we’re having now over sort of direct payments and subsidization, but also the cost of regulation. It makes it impossible because there’s no scenario in which…I mean, currently it’s about 8% of the European agricultural production that is organic, which is about double that of the United States. I don’t know what the Canadian level is. I would have to look that up. There were plans to bring that to 25% by 2035. That’s a significant goal. And they were only going to be able to do that by creating an incentive structure, financial incentive structure that was going to make that possible. That’s something they always talk about in all of these webinars and panels they have, is public procurement. Essentially, that everyone, every government institution would have to engage only with those that produce organic, that every school canteen would only buy food that is organic in order to boost those numbers and get to those 25%, leaving anyone stranded who tries to sell their produce and shift it to organic in an anticipation of that 25% level, being achieved, but not realizing that 25% production doesn’t mean consumers end up buying 25% in the shop.

Bill Wirtz: (29:01)
And I mean, what are retailers going to do if they don’t see that demand? Then what’s the production for? Then? Especially because most of the time they come at hefty premiums, and that’s very expensive for consumers. That shift in production methods means real costs for consumers. And if, you know, farmers can’t swallow all of those costs, they’ll eventually have to be passed on to consumers. With many consumers now finding themself in a situation where there’s still, in many sectors, a lack of employment and high inflation in many different areas of life, we just don’t have the money. I think that’s a big part of it, on top of it being bad policy. It’s also not even affordable. I know that many of those policies will now be dropped on the baseline of it’s not a good time. There’s a war, we’re now in economic difficulties. And I mean, it’s good that some of these policies will be dropped, but we are still not at the recognition that they were a bad idea scientifically and in the first place, also environmentally that they were a bad idea. We’re dropping them now for the wrong reasons. So there’s still so much work left to do.

Clinton Monchuk: (30:14)
So just one last question. So if you could kind of give any advice or different foresight to the consumers who are listening from Canada, what would you say, what would you consider that they think about to avoid having a European kind of policy–food policy–take place?

Bill Wirtz: (30:39)
The reason this was able to happen is because as in many other election campaigns or public debates with policy makers, agriculture very rarely comes up. I listen to my fair share of CBC podcasts and I read the news from Canada, but I don’t follow it as much as there’s only, there’s only 24 hours in a day. I don’t see it come up as much as it should. Questions being asked of leaders, what is your vision for the agricultural sector? How many individual choices should be made by farmers? How big should the toolbox of farmers be? Do you stand behind evidence-based policymaking? I understand that some of these things can be complicated, but they ultimately narrow it down to the least complicated thing that we all need to do every day, which is eat.

Bill Wirtz: (31:30)
And that’s why we should care about this quite significantly. So if it’s an election campaign, and you have the ability of writing in a question, make it about agriculture. Ask about those things like, not just sort of what are the choices I get, but how much can I afford of those food products? But also like, what is your vision? What is your policy? And that, yes, that is often talking to politicians because politics is a lot about trying to hear the music. What’s the direction, where are people going, what are people interested in? That’s what, you know, successful politicians will always do that. So it’s steering them in that direction of trying to think about their views in agriculture that helps voters, consumers to get more transparency and understand better in what direction we’re going. Because I think a lot of Europeans have not sort of woken up to be, wait, what does that mean? Our agriculture system is very complicated. Most people don’t know how it [works], that there’s, there’s so many rules.

Clinton Monchuk: (32:34)
The ability to farm here in Canada is pretty, you know, it’s governed by all these rules, rules and legislations, but it’s not such a fine tooth comb on what you can do. I can still choose what I grow on my land. I can choose the seeds, I can choose to have animal agriculture. I can choose to be plant agriculture, right? Like all these things that require approval from different, you know municipal or different governing bodies that I just, I think wow. We are very fortunate to grow food the way we do here in North America.

Bill Wirtz: (33:06)
You certainly are. And it’s one of those things when it’s a bit like we all have that one drawer at home that has one too many charging cables, and they’ve gotten into a tangled mess that it will take you an afternoon with music and a lot of nerves to untangle, and hopefully you won’t need any of them individually very soon. It’s one of those things where we’ve gotten this far on sort of the regulatory burden that it’s really hard for us to understand who is responsible anymore and what we need to untangle. So the most important thing is if you right now have a system that you say it’s not perfect, but it doesn’t oppress us quite as much as what we see over in Europe, then be wary of every new rule and analyze if it is necessary. Does it fit into it? Is it contradictory with other rules we have? And what does it mean? What would this mean for the farming system? Ask for if a politician suggests a certain policy, what will the impacts be? Has there been an impact assessment? Can we see that data? It’s like, we need to have more due diligence on this because we, in Europe pass legislation a bit willy-nilly, just by feelings, like 50% pesticide reduction by 2030. Where does that number come from? I don’t know, it just looked good in the press release. A lot of these things have gotten us into a lot of trouble. Just pay attention. I think that’s the message.

Clinton Monchuk: (34:39)
I think that’s a good place for us to end the podcast today. And I want to say you’ve really offered a lot of thought-provoking information for what’s happening in the European Union right now. That kind of gives us some food for thought, no pun intended, on what could take place here in Canada. I think there’s a lot of consumers here that are listening to the podcast that will take this to heart hopefully ask some of those questions and make sure that our policies remain science-based. So, thank you very much Bill for being on the podcast, and I think we’ll definitely have you again in the future.

Bill Wirtz: (35:14)
Thank you so much for having me.

Clinton Monchuk: (35:23)
I want to thank you for taking the time to listen to our Ask a Farmer podcast. We at Canadian Food Focus value the input from our listeners and ask that you share the podcast with your friends and family. Remember, this is a two-way street, so we seek your input for future segments that are of interest to you about food and farming. To do this, please click on the ‘Ask Us ‘icon at the top of our website, canadianfoodfocus.org. While you’re there, feel free to follow our numerous social media links and sign up for our newsletter. This segment was produced and edited by Angela Larson, research and writing by Dorothy Long and Penny Eaton. Music by Andy Elson. I’m your host Clinton Monchuk, and from all of us at Canadian Food Focus, we wish you good health and great eats.