Thanks very much, Chair.
As my colleagues have said, thank you so much for being with us today.
You know what? Your testimony in front of us has been excellent. It's been very cohesive, which I like. In other words, you all have the same message, and yet you represent individual producers right through to different organizations. I just want to say that it is very helpful, because it shows that you're working together as an industry to find solutions.
I just have to disagree with Mr. Easter on his strong rebuke. As you know, from living it on the ground, none of this is a science. There is something of an art to this programming, because people can't see the future. I think everybody has been trying to put in place a program, or actually a series of programs, that will work for the hog industry. Some of them have worked very well.
We spoke about APP and it being very beneficial. I hear you about the limits, and I hear you about probably needing another extension.
One of my colleagues mentioned opening foreign markets. Tremendous work has been done there. The installation of the secretariat is more good work.
Then we have these programs we're talking about. Some of them have worked better than others.
For example, with the banking, I mean, I'll just say that I'm very frustrated with the way banks have handled this, as well. You know, Mr. Littlejohn, if I were a banker, I wouldn't want to have you in front of me. You seem to be very well prepared, and you have all your information at hand.
We have tried to take measures to encourage the banks to proceed with these loans. We were backstopping 80%, and then we went to 90%, certainly on the APP portion, to reduce the risk to the banks. I think everyone recognizes that we can't tell the banks when they should loan money and when they shouldn't. But we can certainly put in place what I'll call tools to lower the risk for banks to help them in their decision-making.
Certainly it would be useful if the take-up rate were higher than 3%. I don't think anyone argues with that, and that's where fine-tuning is required in these programs. It's easy, sometimes, for the opposition to throw a dart and say that things should have been perfect right at the outset. But I think we all had high hopes at the outset, because we all worked very hard together to put in place this program.
I wanted to follow up on a question. I think Mr. Hoback was asking Mr. Moffett if he sees a light at the end of the tunnel. The answer was yes. I wanted just to get a bit more information on that. How long do you see this tunnel being, for example? Do you have any sort of feedback on when you will see things actually moving in a positive direction and can say that, yes, recovery now is much closer than it was before? What sorts of specific indicators would you be looking for?
I open the question to anyone who else who would like to add to that answer. I'm interested in knowing the industry's perception of when recovery would be starting to take hold.