Good morning, bonjour, and thank you for allowing me this opportunity to say a few words. I'll try not to repeat everything you've heard this morning. I'd like to echo a lot of what Mr. Dykstra has already presented, but I'll try to be brief and hit some of the highlights.
I wasn't too sure how to approach business risk management, because I know there's a lot of work going on now to retool the programs under that subject. One concern certainly is with the National Safety Nets Advisory Committee that was set up. We were made aware only recently that the committee had been disbanded, and we're wondering why. It sounded to us as though we had good representation there, with a good group of grower representatives. We're wondering why that committee is no longer in place and who is listening to whom as far as recommendations for the new business risk management part of the APF go.
One of the big problems we in the potato industry saw on the business risk management side was that sometimes the programs were sound and could be very helpful, but the delivery became a problem. The delivery of those programs could be improved. One suggestion we've been making is to have a regional office near the cluster areas. That would go a long way, instead of having our growers dealing directly with someone in Winnipeg. Perhaps we could look at a more regionalized office.
We also think one good way to go is through the self-directed type of programs, as we had with the self-directed risk management programs. I know that the horticultural producers in Ontario have a self-directed production insurance that, from what I hear, seems to work quite well for them. That's an area I think we need to be looking at.
We need to try to find a way to have a less ad hoc type of compensation for all these disasters that are always happening. One example I could use is that of our recent scare with the potato cyst nematode. I'm sure you're aware that the region of Quebec was hit hard by this. The ramification for the rest of the potato-growing areas of Canada is that we're being sort of driven by CFIA to go towards national testing. I think there needs to be consultation. We all passed a resolution that there needs to be a good compensation plan in place before this expensive testing and sampling is put in place, because it's going to drive some growers right out. There should be something that growers can plan for.
On the side of renewal, I agree with what you just heard. We need better programs. There needs to be a way to entice our young people to get into farming. There are many significant barriers to entry, and there has to be a way to address those.
We want programs that can make optimal use of this electronic age we're in today. A lot of the growers now have a challenge using their computers to access the Internet. This is a tremendously powerful tool for the farm, but not all rural areas of this country.... Certainly in New Brunswick they're still struggling with dial-up. Having a high-speed Internet connection could make a big difference in the renewal part.
I'll treat the issues of food safety and environment together. I believe those are a high priority. The potato industry has done a lot of work in that area. You probably know that the potato industry led to the development and implementation of farm food safety programs for all the other horticultural crops. We feel we're the first out of the gate from the crop side of that, or the horticultural crop side.
The problem is that growers are trying to implement these changes on the farm, both on the environmental side and on the food safety side, but they don't see a return at the marketplace, and it's a big challenge. They see other products coming into the marketplace that don't have the same environment, and so it's really not a level playing field. We need to find a way to support those growers. When you're talking about the public good, the common good, somehow this is a good place to put some funds into. Growers are really concerned about their environment. They do a good job. They'll do what they have to do, but they reach a point where they need some assistance.
We believe that science and innovation are the foundation for developing the new technologies and for developing these value-added products that we always hear talk of. We've seen it first-hand with varietal development—cultivar development, for example. But we keep hearing about looming cuts to the breeding programs and how doing cultivar evaluation trials is no longer considered innovative. We see that as very innovative. It may be the best bang for the buck that we can get.
We want strong programs that provide stable long-term funding. No one is going to start a breeding program or do rotational crop studies if they don't have an expectation of some long-term stable funding. We need this to remain competitive with our major competitors, especially in the U.S. In our case, when these science and innovation program dollars trickle down to the province, we've tried to streamline that process. We have a very active grower-industry stakeholder committee, which recommends and prioritizes projects for funding. By the time we get through all the proposals, make our recommendations, and they go through them again with the provincial-federal committees, there can be quite long delays in actually accessing that funding. It's almost a perennial problem. It's planting season and we don't know if certain projects are going ahead. We could be missing some really narrow planting windows to get the trials in place. That is a key. We have to somehow get that streamlined.
The final area I want to talk about is market and trade. I'd like to put quite an emphasis on that part. That was the missing pillar in the first round of the APF. I hear that it might be included in this next generation. We fully support that. We must have strong programs for market and trade promotion. We want to establish and promote our products worldwide. We want to establish more free trade zones. We need more trade partnerships with many of these promising countries all over the world that have a demand for our products. We're continually faced with high tariffs in certain areas that are trying to buy our products. They are handcuffed by these tariffs. If we could establish more free trade zones, I'm sure we could sell a lot more product worldwide.
In New Brunswick, we seem to have fallen behind. We're losing out. Other areas are more competitive. They're ahead of us. They're doing more aggressive marketing. We need to be more aggressive. We have to make new trade deals. We have to do more promotion of our products. This would hold not just for potatoes; I'm talking about all agricultural products. We have to promote the fact that we are doing all this work on food safety and protecting our environment.
In the first round of the APF we kept talking about brand in Canada. I don't think we have done that or achieved that. We have to brand ourselves. There has to be some funds available for international marketing. That's our bread and butter. In our province, 80% to 90% of our potatoes go outside. If we don't have any programs we can access to do this promotion and marketing.... We're way behind our competitors and we've already seen the erosion of some of our traditional markets. We have to maintain our existing markets, the ones we've had success in before, and we have to establish some new ones.
Mr. Chairman, that is basically my presentation for today.