Thank you very much, folks, for being here.
Before I start, I'd like to apologize to my colleagues. It took me three days to get here from my home.
The main theme here that I want to look at—and I'm glad you folks are here—is the whole idea of producer involvement and the effect on producers.
The first category is biofuels. I'm just wondering how much incentive there is in producer involvement in this new strategy, or is a lot of the subsidy going to multinationals to set up so that they can provide jobs and provide a place for grains? I'm just wondering how carefully this is examined.
I know, the more research I do, that there are concerns with the whole idea of ethanol from corn, ethanol from sugar, the input/output, the energy, and the greenhouse gases. But at the same time, we know this is a way of helping farmers. We know this, and we're seeing some results.
I'm wondering what the long-term strategy is, especially as far as a farmer is concerned, in the whole idea of a safe environmental strategy for biofuels. We're moving into the whole APF, and I see it's been broadened to include the agri-based products industry. I'm wondering where the primary producer fits in. We often see the term “industry”, and I'm just hoping this isn't at the expense of the primary producer.
This is my last question. In the last few months, I've had an immersion in the whole issue of food security, from a conference in my town of Nelson in my district, to the NFU conference, to a meeting last Thursday—a dinner sponsored by the OFA and others.
The whole talk now is about the future of food and food security and the studies that have been done—and we mentioned it in our report, as our last recommendation—and yet the whole issue of trade obligations comes up. I'm wondering whether we can really have a food security strategy in Canada, when we have these trade obligations, to promote buying locally and promote the primary producer without being squeezed by NAFTA or the WTO, because that's another issue that seems to be coming up.
That's my question. How can we have a food-secure nation, meet our trade obligations, and make sure that the primary producer benefits from this?