Thank you very much, Mr. Arya.
I think you're hitting on a very important point, but the reality is that we have companies that are doing business on a day-to-day basis that have to deal with tariffs and non-tariff barriers in countries. I think that in the future, in particular if you take a look at the Canadian economy and how we're evolving, a lot of the technology that's driving our competitiveness and our effectiveness in the global marketplace needs to be considered in the context of how we're doing business.
In the context of India, for example—and this is one of the things I was trying to discuss at the time I was high commissioner—when we sell pulses or potash to India, we're very susceptible to non-tariff barriers and very susceptible to the whims and fancies of the geopolitical relationship on a bilateral basis, but if we understand how we can work with India to help them build their own agricultural technology expertise in collaboration with us, in a partnership with us, it changes the dynamic to a certain degree.
It's important for us to have the pulse or the potash exports going into India, or the other commodities. They're very susceptible to price demands in the marketplace and they're also susceptible to non-tariff barriers, but when you talk about partnerships in agricultural technology and working with India to help them improve their efficiencies in productivity but also help us in what we're trying to do in that particular space, it has a much larger impact on our global marketplace.
As an example, if we're working with India on helping them become more efficient in productivity of their agricultural sector through geospatial relationships, through the technologies that we're developing here in Canada—very astutely, whether it's through the protein supercluster or other places—and we work with India in a partnership on that, when it comes to data in the agricultural space, that's a different dimension of an economic partnership.
These are some of the things that we should be building into the early progress agreement that we're talking about now. This is something that's in the interest of both India and Canada. We benefit from having more access to their data, because they're much more.... As you can imagine, Canada's a small market of 35 million to 40 million, depending on how you want to determine the number, but India has 1.4 billion people. Some of the data that's not personalized that comes out of that, just in the mobile sector, for mobile farmers—almost everybody has a mobile phone in India now—in the agricultural space will be of benefit to us when it comes to building the algorithms that will make us more effective in the global marketplace, not just in the market of India.
That's how we have to start thinking, but we can't abandon the reality that we have exporters that depend on managing the tariff rate schedules in various countries. It's really what I would call the “A-level agreement”—I'm sorry—like CPTPP, versus just having a standard trade agreement.