Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Canadian Wheat Board has marketed the wheat, durum, and barley produced by western Canadian farmers on the basis of a branding strategy with customers that established their products as the gold standard for quality, consistency, and reliability for many years. KVD is a visual quality-control system that was the basis of the ability to attest to this quality for wheat and durum. In the new environment, we cannot afford to let this quality slip or jeopardize the loyalty and confidence that customers have in the grain they buy from western Canada. We are therefore working on this issue on two fronts.
As Mr. Hermanson has said, we're working with farmers and industry, including the Canadian Grain Commission, to develop a set of protocols based on what we're already doing with ineligible varieties, to ensure the supply chain delivers the quality our customers require. The board of directors of the Canadian Wheat Board has made significant investments in the development of two tests, both laboratory-based, that will have the capacity to screen for varieties on the driveway of an elevator to back up these protocols. This technology has been a long time coming, but we think we're close.
The CWB has been the leader in trying to get variety identification technology in place as soon as possible, but it is not available yet. In this regard, industry and the CWB would have preferred that the federal government stick to the original implementation date of August 1, 2010, for the elimination of KVD requirements in the major classes of wheat. It would also considerably facilitate the transition to a non-KVD environment if the federal government partnered with farmers of western Canada in investing in the commercial testing of the technologies that have been developed to identify varieties of wheat.
Thank you.