Thank you.
As I said in my remarks, the pesticide manufacturers and developers, the process market base, typically look upon Canada as having big acres of wheat, oats, barley, and canola. Ergo, with the $200 million or $300 million that it takes to develop a molecule from the beginning to the end, you can economically advance into those marketplaces. However, other crops that are termed as minor use are very important. They have emerged over the last 10 to 15 years to the point where you and I might view them as major crops, yet they're still viewed as minor crops. I'm thinking of chick peas, lentils, the pulse sector, canary seeds, and all those crops that have become very important, especially in the prairie basin.
As we go forward with this new agriculture of the future, where you start to grow crops not only for food and feed but for some of these very specific uses, we see emerging low transfat canola, functional food crops, and nutraceuticals. Some of these very precise crops may be from very small acres but are of very high value.
Those that would fall into that category are what I would call a micro crop. The term by which they are identified in our industry is “micro crops of the future”. All the challenges that we have for minor use will be just as big or greater for the micro crop. We think that is very important for the future of agriculture.
On the term “synchronous registration”, I'm trying to come to the same point that I think Dr. Dodds was at. We recognize that Canada will probably never be in a position, and rightly so, to abrogate the final decision to another jurisdiction or another sovereign country. If we can take the same data, evaluate it in the same way, and ultimately come up with the same decision at the same time--i.e., synchronicity or whatever—that would be a pretty good end point for us.
That would be a simple way of describing our goals on harmonization. I don't know if my colleague, Peter MacLeod, has further comments on that.