Thanks, Mr. Chair, and thank you gentlemen, for coming and for great presentations.
You haven't seen it, I don't think, but Jean-Denis Fréchette of the Library of Parliament prepared a really good paper on the biofuels issue as well.
It's startling when you look at the production that's in place now in the United States or on line. The bottom line figures are basically this. The U.S. on line, or coming into line, or already producing, will be at about 21 billion litres, and we will barely hit the billion with what's on stream at the moment. And that's way off what are generally comparison figures between Canada and the United States. If anything, we should be at least at 10% of their level.
A number of you mentioned value-added and, I guess, in developing the policy, how do we make sure that producers get paid for the actual value of the raw material going in? And 10¢ a bushel isn't going to cut it; it isn't going to solve the farm problem.
Mr. Teneycke, in the closing paragraph of your paper you talked about the economic and social benefits. And they are there; there's no question about it. You go on to say, however, that to realize them we must have a competitive industry built on a solid economic and regulatory foundation that is competitive with other countries.
Therein lies our problem. The U.S. farm policy is allowing raw production to go into these plants way below their value. Their farm policy brings it up through commodity support, and so producers get paid for that value.
There is the other side of the coin--ownership equity, capital, and so on--and I don't want to get into that at the moment.
In Canada, our farm policy is far different--and I'm not criticizing this government any more than the one we were part of--and it creates a difficulty for us both. You can't compete if you have to pay producers more money than the United States raw production going into those plants. Our producers can't survive if we don't bring up the raw material cost of that product going in.
Do you see any way of bridging that dilemma?