Thank you very much.
I'd also like to add my welcome to the committee and honourable members coming to Alberta to listen to us. We really appreciate the opportunity to share some of our views from Alberta and across Canada with you. I do think that the consultative process is very important. We're quite confident you'll take our comments back and use them.
I just want to very briefly indicate, representing Alberta Pork and the pork industry in Canada, that at times I think we in Canada don't understand the importance of the hog industry in this country. We export over a million tonnes of pork out of Canada on a yearly basis. For beef it's about 400,000 tonnes. So the amount of product we export is over double—two and a half times—that exported for beef. As well, we import 130,000 tonnes, compared with beef imports at 200,000 tonnes. That's just to lay a bit of ground work. As Canadian representatives, you have to understand how large the hog industry is and how big an effect it has in Canada and what we add to the gross national product of this country. It's very significant. At times we feel we're being left out of policy decisions. We spend far fewer research dollars than are spent for any of the other commodities, which is totally out of sync with the number of dollars we create for the general well-being of Canada. I just want to put that in perspective. You as our political representatives have to understand and realize the additional importance that needs to be placed on our industry.
I just want to go through some of the issues I've laid out here, and I'm certainly open to discussion about them later.
Certainly market development and trade are very important issues for the pork industry. We export over 60% of what we produce in Canada. It goes to other countries in the world. We're certainly disturbed at times by the policy of our government on the WTO in trading off some sectors against others. It's very important to us in the hog industry that we have as free access and as free trade around the world as possible. The WTO negotiations are absolutely critical for our industry. We believe they're critical for the Canadian agriculture industry in general. I think sometimes we get bogged down in politics and vote buying and support specific commodities rather than the general good of Canada.
I challenge you to really set politics aside and look at what's good for this country. I was here as well and listened to some of the comments before. COOL—country-of-origin labelling—in the U.S. is a major issue for us as well. We're very involved in that. The Canadian Pork Council has put together a committee to work with some of our American counterparts. It really is a counterproductive program that the Americans are putting in place as a non-tariff trade barrier. Again, I think it's something that, as a government, we do need to discuss and talk about with the Americans, and really make it clearer that our borders need to be more open when we trade with each other. Putting things like this in place just isn't good for either of our countries.
If we look at the business risk management side, there are several factors to it. Our concern always is to treat all commodities in the same way. I'm a hog farmer, a grain farmer, and a cattle farmer. I think I can speak from personal experience about how the three commodities are treated very differently.
If we have trouble in pork, we virtually get nothing. In grains, they have the ability to have production insurance, crop insurance. They get cash payments on acreages sometimes if there's a panic somewhere else. When there's a drought, cattle farmers get an acreage payment, and they have crop insurance as well for pasture and hay. These things are not available to me as a hog farmer.
At some point in time, I think our government needs to realize that if we have programs in place, they need to be in place for all commodities. As a major industry in this country, we are being left out in that regard. I'm encouraged by the cash advance and the discussion on production insurance in order to expand it, but we're again trying to fit a square peg in a round hole in trying to use the grain program to fit into livestock. It really doesn't work. We need to get our heads around that and work around it.
The newest announcement was about what may be a NISA-like program again. It didn't work for hogs before. What would ever make you think it's going to work for us in the future? I think it's a political decision that really wasn't thought through very well.
The competitiveness issue is absolutely critical. We passed out a report that we've drawn up, through the Canadian Pork Council, the Canadian Meat Council, and Canadian Pork International. We actually sent it to Minister Strahl. I hope you have some time to read it. It's a very in-depth document on some of the problems facing our industry at the present time. If you'd like to ask questions on it, we can certainly deal with them in the question period. On competitiveness, that's what that is.
In addition, I just want to highlight one thing. High-yield grain varieties are something on which we're lagging behind the Americans. If you look at the graph, the yield of corn has gone up and barley and feed wheat are like this. The gap is just widening more and more. We need to catch up on that. We need to do our job. We need to put research in and we need to be open to accepting new varieties. We need to remember that. We have a grain variety, a high-yielding feed wheat variety, but because visual distinction isn't possible, we don't allow it into this country. So what do we do? We make it harder and make our industry or the total feeding industry less competitive.
The last issue I want to address is the environmental issue. There's a lot of discussion on the bioenergy side. It's a very important fact. I know we keep going around it and we're calling it an environmental thing. Well, the discussion before was quite clear that it's very questionable whether it's an environmental program or something else.I would like to give you a solution. I believe the bioenergy program, expanded into the biogas portion, can be environmentally positive for the world, for this country, and for this province. Put our energy toward that rather than taking food out of production or increasing the price of food. Putting some of the dollars into biogas generating plants uses a byproduct retaining the actual nutrient value of these products. We can create energy and heat from that, so I think that's where we need to put our energy. It will be money well spent and will be something very positive.
In addition, when you add the carbon credits to that, it becomes an extra income stream for the livestock industry. It becomes a solution environmentally and a solution financially as well.
Mr. Chairman, with that, I'll leave the comments now and welcome any discussion on questions.