I didn't prepare a shopping list to come here today, but there certainly are many. I think that many of the traditional areas of agricultural research have been neglected in recent years as there has been more of a dependence placed on the private sector to undertake this kind of research.
So an awful lot of agronomic types of research, certainly on the commodities that are not easily patentable, like the wheats and the barleys, have been cut back. The scientists in the federal government, the Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada scientists, have been placed under an awful lot of pressure to try to raise their own research funding from generally provincial programs that are tied very closely to applied types of research. They want immediate payoffs. So on a lot of the more basic types of research that have led to our increases in competitiveness in the past, we've seen a big slowdown.
There has been a trend going towards huge projects that may have some benefit in, for example, bioplastics, but a neglect, I think, of the traditional kinds of public-good types of research that we have seen, that we need. I think there's a whole list of these, but really just overall, funding needs to be increased.