Thank you, Mr. Chair.
When you look at the development of the biofuels industry, the position, in terms of the various commodities, to a great extent depends on whose ox is being gored.
I can never understand, for the life of me, why the agriculture industry, in terms of the various commodities, can't get together, and instead of the feeding industry being competitive with the feed grains industry, be complementary and ensure that we have systems in place so that at the end of the day the consumer pays for what farmers produce. But that requires marketing power, and for whatever reason, farmers don't want to go that way, and certainly neither does this government.
The fact of the matter, Andrew, is that the United States government policy has distorted the prices of grains for more than a decade by pushing them artificially low. We've built an industry on low grain prices, and we're going to have to find a way to ensure profitability in your industry as well as in the grain industry. We can't, basically, have industries built on cheap grain, because those producers can't survive. That's one of our problems. There are no easy answers there, but that is the problem.
If you want to comment on that, you can in a moment.
Regarding ethanol and biodiesel, there's a lot of talk, a lot of smoke and mirrors, in terms of the proposals in this industry. From your perspective on where the Government of Canada is going with ethanol and biodiesel in this country as compared with the United States, how do we relate?
The fact of the matter is that unless access to money is made available to you, I can't see how you can get in and stay in the game. The 10¢ and 20¢ incentive rates they talk about are only in place for three years. How can you build an ethanol and biodiesel industry if your timeframe is three years? It needs to be five or ten years. So I raise those questions to you.
My worry with ethanol and biodiesel is that, yes, it will be good for a while; it will raise prices in terms of corn and wheat and so on in the short term. But at the end of the day, the way it's currently established, is the policy really going to build another profit centre for the oil industry rather than a profit centre for rural communities?
Do you have any thoughts on that?