I don't think it's that other countries don't care to the same extent we do or don't adjust to their trade challenges as we do. It's economies of scale. We probably export more per capita than any other agricultural country in the world. We're just that good at it.
I think consumers are getting more and more concerned with what they're eating and what they're able to buy. They want truth in labelling on the store shelves so they know exactly what is in the product. There's a tremendous number of examples out there that you can point to that say “this is made in China”, “this is made in India”, but it's in a jar that says “product of Canada” because the label, the jar, and the processing was done here. We need to be better equipped to make those decisions off the store shelves.
I think it's very important too that we start to analyze the environmental footprint on the cost of that food. When you look at transportation of the little gherkin pickles from India as opposed to what comes out of the greenhouses in Quebec and Ontario, etc., you've got to start to analyze that environmental footprint and what it costs to get that product here. Even though it's cheaper to buy, what was the environmental footprint?
Consumers are getting more concerned with those types of situations as well. That's leading to the drive behind the food sovereignty movement and different things like that. We've actually put some money into the food sovereignty issue to try to drive a pilot project that we can work with on a federal scale. We'll have to see what that looks like at the end of the day. I had a discussion with some of the folks at the UPA the other day on that issue.
There's a tremendous amount of possibilities out there, and I think we have to be much more innovative than we've been up to this point. I don't think farmers any longer want to be hewers of wood and drawers of water; they want to be innovators, businessmen, and they want to sell their product to the world.