Thank you, and I welcome the committee to Kings—Hants and downtown Greenwich. It's like New York City compared to downtown Cheverie, where I live, but I welcome all of you here.
Each of you brings a number of important issues to the fray. These are complex issues.
I deal with trade issues typically as a member of the trade committee, so I'm dealing with things such as country-of-origin labelling in the States or defending supply management with free trade talks to the EU. So I want to start with some trade issues.
What can we do, or what should we be doing, in terms of policies to broaden and diversify markets for Atlantic Canadian agriculture? There is a real demand in places such as China for high-end produce, things like honey crisp, for example. There is a great interest in China in some of the higher margin and relatively new crops that you're producing. Is there a potential for niche marketing, high-end Atlantic Canadian agriculture in the U.S. that we're missing, that we ought to be doing more?
I'm going to lay out a few things. In terms of market access, we have two major grocery distributors in Canada. Both Loblaw's and Sobeys have one regional purchasing group in the Maritimes. We have Buy New Brunswick plans, we have Buy Nova Scotia plans, and we have Buy P.E.I. plans. Are we dividing up the Maritimes to our own detriment, and should we be working together to approach the grocery chains as one regional Buy Atlantic or Buy Maritime program? I'm hearing that from some groups we're meeting with.
I'm listing some of these things, and then you can respond in total.
On supply management, it does strike me that the supply management commodity groups have access to a reasonable income for what they're producing on an ongoing basis. This is controversial in some quarters, but should we be looking at broadening that approach to other commodity groups? Is that the kind of approach that can provide ongoing income that is predictable for farmers to receive a fair price for what they're producing?
On the land-banking issue, this is something that has come up a lot in Kings County in terms of farmers deserving a fair price for their main asset—land—when they're retiring but wanting to keep prime agricultural land in agriculture, and what's the potential federal role for that?
Finally, on research, there's a trend in agricultural research towards centralization. Would you agree that we should be actually doing more decentralization, connecting the scientists by IT and technology but keeping the research close to the farmers and the commodities affected by that research, particularly if you look at the Kentville Research Station as an example of that, as we move forward to higher margin crops and produce?
Thanks very much. I'll look forward to hearing from all of you on some of these.