I want to respond to the question of why we should lend these producers money if they can't produce for cost of production. If we lend producers money and keep them in business, are we only digging them in deeper?
I can tell you that we have gone through this same discussion and spent a lot of time at it. As I said, this is a very deep crisis, and every time you go through this--I was around in 1998 as well--you ask yourself if it is ever going to get better. Curtiss certainly alluded to there probably being a tremendous crisis just in producers' confidence. They see the dollar and they say this crisis is in big part because of the dollar, and when is it going to get better? You certainly heard some requests for the government to try to do something about the exchange rate.
That being said, obviously if we didn't think this crisis would be over at some point we probably wouldn't be here. We'd be saying let's change our industry, let's send all our weaners to the U.S. The market information we have is that the world market for pork is going to grow. It's going to grow a tremendous amount, and the indication is that Canada certainly is poised to fill a larger share of that bigger market. We feel there definitely is a future in the growth in consumption of pork. We know that every exporting nation in the world is losing money producing pork. To say the situation is so bad it's never going to get better....
We obviously think there is a market out there. We obviously think that Canadians are competitive and are able to fill that market. We just don't want to lose our production capability right now; we want to be able to be here when that situation turns around. It's a liquidity issue for us.