I'd like to thank everyone for giving me the opportunity to come here and speak today too. We work fairly closely together on a lot of what Gerard was just talking about, shipping internationally and so on.
I'm an organic farmer. I'm the sixth generation on my mother's side on the farm, so we've been there for quite a little while. My father came over from Holland and bought very much into the whole green revolution and cut out all the hedgerows and so on. Now we're putting the hedgerows back in, so it's funny how things go around.
We've seen in the last few years that the organic industry is growing quite rapidly. We're finding a lot of new markets and new opportunities. But one of the things that has been quite a big challenge for us is the Canadian standards, because in the United States they have equivalency already with Japan. They are working with equivalency with the EU and it gives them quite a big advantage shipping-wise. We still have to pay an extra $1,000 roughly for our farm to get the Japanese agriculture standard, whereas in the United States they pay $50 from a farm. So it's a big difference.
The whole GMO issue is also a big issue from an organic perspective, but also from a conventional perspective, because we're shipping non-GMO conventionally grown canola to Japan, which Gerard's growing and a whole bunch of other farmers here are growing in P.E.I.
We need to recognize whose interests are being served by the genetically modified crops, whether it's actually the farmers' interests that are being served or whether it's the corporate interests of the companies that are actually producing the seed.
I just want to relate an issue that really hit me last fall. I went to a whole bunch of countries in Europe, but I was in Denmark dealing with a feed company there and it was a shocking thing for me when I sat down talking to a lady in Tvis and she said she didn't want to put “Product of Canada” on. They're buying their organic soybean from China right now. She was worried about putting “Product of Canada” on the label, because she thought it was going to be hard for them to sell it, because Canada has got such a bad reputation from the environment, she said, and from GMO contamination. I was over there talking about selling non-GMO canola meal and non-GMO organic soybean.
I've gone down to Wayne Easter's office and got the Canada flags. I've got them stuck all over my luggage. That's the first time I've ever had someone look at me and think it was better to get it from China than it was to get from it Canada to be able to sell their product. That was a real wake-up call for me.
I had to explain I'm coming from an island on the east coast of Canada, that we have a large non-GMO capability here, and so on. It's just something to keep in mind international-trade-wise. Everyone's heard about the flax issues and so on. It's quite a big issue.
Some of the things we need to do to trade.... Farmers are constantly challenged. We've been producing for a long time, and not necessarily working as hard in the marketplace. We've been counting on other people to market our products after we produce them, and I think as farmers we have to do a better job of marketing our products ourselves.
We've gotten a lot of assistance from the provincial government here to go to trade shows in Japan. I've been back and forth six times, I guess, to the FOODEX show, and I would say a lot of the federal programs are not really geared to help the farmers necessarily. They're more for the companies and so on. Maybe they don't expect individual farmers to go and try to sell their stuff directly to consumers, but I see that as an opportunity for us to be able to do a much better job of that.
What we're doing is profiling all the farmers, telling the story. If you buy a bottle of jam in Japan, we can trace that right back to the farmer and we can profile the farmer's family and we've got that on a website so people can actually see the family. So we're wanting to connect and we want the consumers to actually realize when they buy something they're helping an individual farmer at this end.
We can do the same thing with the canola and with all the different crops, because we have the capability to do the traceability now. But from our perspective, as farmers, it's all new for us.
I'm much more interested in having a discussion. I'm not going to talk here a long time. If I liked to preach I would have been a minister. I would sooner have questions and answers afterwards, so I'll pass it on for someone else.