Thank you, Mr. Valeriote.
AFMNet brings many contributions to this country of Canada. I'll start off with the human capital aspect. Presently we train 179 HQP, or highly qualified personnel. They range from undergraduates to post-doctoral fellows. So we train a number of people, and in different environments too. The whole thesis of AFMNet is to do research in a multidisciplinary way. We often have physicists working with food scientists who are working with social scientists to look at the acceptability and risk-benefit analysis of some of the research we do. So there's a huge amount of investment in our future leaders in the food industry.
We also support researchers, of course. We're supporting approximately 175 researchers from right across Canada. This literally goes from the University of Victoria to Memorial on the east coast. So there's that aspect.
There's also the aspect of helping Canadian companies become competitive in an ever-increasing globally competitive environment. We have members from Maple Leaf Foods, and Ocean Nutrition, which are world renowned in their areas. They need the kind of research we're doing in order to be competitive.
As you've indicated, we're looking at issues that affect the population of Canada and people globally, such as sodium reduction and trans fat, which are contributors to the global epidemics of type 2 diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular disease.
We're also helping Canadians become entrepreneurs. We've spun off some of the companies from the research that our researchers and graduate students have done. Again, this is a wonderful thing.
We've also helped the small to medium-size enterprises--not as many as we'd like to, but there are some wonderful ideas that occur at that level, and Canada is largely an SME community at the food industry level.
Thank you.