Good morning. My name is Richard Phillips. I'm the executive director of the Grain Growers of Canada, and my wife and I still maintain a grain farm in Saskatchewan.
With me today is a director of the Grain Growers of Canada, Mr. Leo Meyer. Leo is a grains and oilseeds farmer from the Peace River area. He's also a director of the Alberta Oat, Rye, & Triticale Association. In addition to raising his six children, he finds time to farm about 14,000 acres of land and is well aware of the input costs up in the Peace River area.
Following on what Bob said, fertilizer, pesticides, fuel, seed, transportation, repairs, wages...there are a lot of input costs for farmers when putting out our crops. Most of these, we feel, are greatly influenced by supply and demand, and as we look at what's happening with the biofuels and with the growth in the demand from India, from China, from Brazil, we think that we're in a new era when there is going to be more global competition, even for the inputs we have available.
For years, on the food side, we've had burdensome supplies in the EU and the U.S., and I think as we look around now there has been--for many, many years people have talked about this--how many days the food supply is inching down, down, down. It doesn't take much in the increase in demand and suddenly these food supplies, the stocks, reserves, are gone, and as a result of that demand we're seeing grain prices going up.
With the grain prices going up, you see people wanting to increase production, as for example, in the U.S. where corn acres have gone up about 10 million acres in the last couple of years. Fertilizer-intensive...there's a huge demand for fertilizer down there. Here are some rough numbers for you. From India we've seen increases of imports of urea fertilizer from one million to six million tonnes, just in the last three years. We see Brazil, estimated at another 25% increase in the coming years. China is increasing imports.
So when we see rising fertilizer prices, do we want to pay higher fertilizer prices as farmers? Absolutely not. Is it a function of being gouged? It's hard to know that sometimes. Bob and I have both had meetings with the fertilizer industry, looking at their demand side, and there is a lot of global competition for the fertilizer that is produced here in North America. So that's one of the main factors that we see driving that up.
Leo wanted to mention one option that we have as farmers, and that is on the pricing.