Thank you.
I'll touch on the trade issue. I raised it from the point of view of how it would affect grains and oilseeds. I understand fully that whatever the negotiations are, it's much broader than grains and oilseeds. It's on supply management, vegetables, and non-agricultural market access. It's cars from Korea. It's the total global trade. I was trying to identify it from our perspective. I'll give you an example.
Before the last U.S. Farm Bill, flax and pulses were not included in the bill. When they were included in the U.S. Farm Bill, they were traditionally just a few thousand acres of flax grown in the United States. Last year alone they had just about one million acres of flax seeded in the United States. Clearly the market is not demanding that yet. There is increasing demand for flax, omega-3, and things like that, but the market is not demanding it yet.
I'll go back again to the study from 1995 to 2000 in which they felt that approximately five million acres per year in the United States alone were planted just to trigger government payments. So five million acres of production is being put on the world market, and that continually depresses our prices.
Last year before the Hong Kong ministerial I looked at the mid-November loan deficiency payments. If I could have received those same loan deficiency payments on my production from the 2005 crop year at the mid-November price, I could have picked up a cheque for just under $56,000 U.S. That's how it affects us. I'm just raising those issues for grains and oilseeds.