There are several questions there, and of course it's a very complicated subject, as the member knows, and he's listed some of those considerations.
One is, of course, that the best way forward is still through negotiations at the WTO. We still believe that the best way forward is a multilateral deal that will bring domestic subsidies down and pry open market access through reducing tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade. So that's still the best way forward. Farmers then can get their value from the marketplace, as the member has often said and written about, and that is ideal.
However, as the member has also noted, right now those negotiations are in hiatus, and who knows when they're going to get going? So it's a big concern to us and has spawned other actions on the government's behalf, including statements and commitments by the Minister of International Trade to start moving aggressively on bilateral agreements, which are a sorry second best, but something we do have to move on.
On the issue of cost of production guarantees, what I have said in the past and I still believe is true is that if we in Canada were to try to move to a U.S.-type system, where they basically spend approximately 90% of their subsidies on five basic products, I just don't think Canada can afford it. The costs would be astronomical here in Canada. We export, of course, a far greater proportion of our product than the Americans do percentage-wise, and also their programming is targeted only for five product lines, so I'm not sure what we would say to the rest of the industry that we currently support--everybody from hogs, and beef, and horticulture, and you name it--who currently receive some benefits from our list of programming, which under an American system would be cut completely out.
Someone was telling me just earlier today that even in the United States they're now looking at options. Apparently the corn growers down there are even, for example, suggesting that they actually should move toward a margin-based program. They want a commodity-by-commodity program to change.
It does seem to me that what we need to do is fix the programming that we have now, which is what we're moving forward on, and also to address, in this upcoming discussion that's going to start this fall, the bigger issues of long-term profitability issues. These issues need to be part of this discussion that's going to start taking place this fall, and so again we have programming that has continued I think to be more responsive, quicker, and there's more of it certainly, but it is my belief that a cost of production programming equivalent to that in the United States won't get the job done in Canada. Our situation is different and it's not affordable, would be countervailable, and is not in the best long-term interest of our industry.