Our position with all countries, I think, just like Canada, is that we urge them to adopt the now adopted OIE standards. So we would urge them to allow the same standards and product coming from Canada as from the United States. We aren't over there saying to take our beef but still be concerned about Canada's.
Are they legitimate? I think we would say no. We believe that with the OIE standards, you can pretty much trade in beef with the SRM removal and under certain conditions. So we are really urging all countries to do that, just as in the case of Canada. It's perfectly safe.
So it's very frustrating. Japan has twenty months. There's no basis, scientifically, for the twenty months. We are trying to get them to go, because right now what they're finding is that the consumer wants the American beef or the Canadian beef. Your exporters have found the same thing. They can't, frankly, get enough of it to supply their demand for those cuts by doing what they're trying to do and limiting themselves to the twenty-month-old animal.
So we find that the Japanese consumer still has confidence in North American beef, and we are very much urging that they.... Again, we feel that we in North America have a unique product here in terms of many things, but particularly in terms of beef, grain-fed beef that is not produced as abundantly in other countries. So whether they buy it from the U.S. or from Canada, the more we can get consumers overseas to want that type of beef, the more we're both going to benefit. So we very much want to get beef from North America into the Asian markets--all of them.