[Technical Difficulty--Editor]...determine the extent of the so-called farmers’ privilege and the erosion of it over time as it's developed.
Certainly the UPOV 91 is a template law. Much of this legislation is lifted directly from that template in terms of the amendments, the language, the rights conveyed to breeders. More extensively, once we enact this legislation with its particular elements, and as we're shifting into a period of time when international trade agreements increasingly include investor-state protection mechanisms, the ability to shift the ground in terms of making it perhaps more advantageous to local food production, Canadian farmers, and so on would be lost, because we'd be locked into compensating those so-called players—international players, corporations, whoever it might be—for lost future profits.
We've experienced that with NAFTA. Certainly those pieces come together along with increased enforcement provisions for all intellectual property rights, including plant breeders' rights, that are extremely draconian. I could expand on that; it includes the seizure from farmers—and not just farmers, but any alleged infringer of an intellectual property right—of their properties and of their assets, and the freezing of bank accounts, etc. This is what I talked about in terms of litigation chill that would cause farmers to purchase seed, whether they needed to or not, on a more continuous basis, and result in increased costs for farmers.
If we look at agricultural policy in general, I think we can see a pretty big failure in agriculture policy in this country. The biggest element of that is the massive increase in farm debt that we've seen in the last number of years in spite of a previous cycle of a bit more buoyant agricultural prices—they're down now—and the decreasing number of farms in this country.
So I don't think anyone can pat themselves on the back that agricultural policy has been improving the lot of farmers in general. It's been externalizing costs onto farmers and showing up on their debt register.