With regard to NAFTA and your comments about apples, I'm not going to comment on that. You've heard that this morning, and the apple people are the experts here, not me.
With regard to NAFTA and has it been good for the industry, yes or no, it's a bit of a mixed bag. We have the greenhouse vegetable industry, which is highly dependent upon trade into the United States. Their biggest problem over the last few years has been an increase in the Canadian dollar valuation. The bio-security on any fresh product going into the United States can be held up, and because it is fresh and is not a storable commodity, after a day at the border the crop is ruined. So this is huge, and the Americans play the way the Americans play.
For others, NAFTA has not worked out well. Our biggest concern, however, goes beyond NAFTA, and as we're into more and more global trading and the logistics of moving fresh fruit around the world have been overcome, you can have fresh product from anywhere around the world on our shelves within a 36- to 48-hour period. In China and India the labour wage is less than $1 a day, and we're paying $14, $15 and more per hour. In Peru--we've a lot of competition from Peruvian asparagus--it's $5 a day. Those are some of the issues, and I don't know how you get around that, trying to block anybody or anything at the border, quite frankly, when we live with this global trading, and the removal of the tariffs that happened in 1988-89 and beyond. So it is difficult.
Our biggest hurdle, quite frankly, is that we live in a high-cost-of-production society and are trying to compete with those who don't have the same regulations, don't have the same input costs, whose products are coming in here. To me, it's more of a food security issue and being able to feed ourselves. If we don't take care of that, we have a problem.