Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Good morning and thank you for being here.
A lot is being said about commercialization, about the huge sums of money at stake, but we must realize that hunger and malnutrition are affecting some 1 billion people in the world today. Of course, for some, biotechnology and its innovations can be part of a food safety plan. However, something that is being increasingly discussed by people around the world today—and rightfully so, in my view, for having attended a number of conferences on the issue—is the need to better promote food sovereignty, which is not in contradiction with food security. Needless to say, many of the companies that engage in commercializing biotechnologies do not have as their primary concern peoples' food security, but rather they want to make people dependent on those biotechnologies. That is a real danger. I agree that biotechnology is not all bad, but neither is it a cure-all that will help people... Besides, if that were the case, I think that malnutrition and suffering caused by hunger in the world would no longer exist.
Mr. Hepworth, I would like to come back to a document produced by your industry association, CropLife, in which you raise problems with regard to the European Union. Does the European Union currently not have a 0.9% tolerance level concerning genetically modified organisms? Does that not permit you to trade with the European Union?