First of all, going back in time a few years, as Lucy referenced, market acceptance wasn't there, so the Roundup Ready wheat was shelved in Canada. Having said that, we had as a guest speaker at our conference a couple of weeks ago here in Ottawa a representative of the world's largest private wheat-breeding company. He described wheat, I thought, very accurately. He described it as a technologically orphaned crop, and that's not just in Canada but in the U.S. as well. The wheat growers there are very concerned about the lack of research and development, the lack of technological innovation in wheat.
The second thing I would relate to your question is that wheat is very much on the radar screen of our member companies. There are three dimensions. It's a staple crop in the world. It's an important crop in the world: a couple of billion people rely on it for food. Farmers here probably need it as a rotation crop, albeit as one that has been very uneconomic. It's on their radar screen from the standpoint of better protection for the seed itself, from needing new products to deal with weeds and diseases and so on that arise in wheat. And then lastly there is the role it could play with regard to genomics, epigenomics, biotechnology, clever plant breeding, and all those kinds of things.
To that end, as we've examined this, I have gone down to Mexico City to look at CIMMYT, which is the Norman Borlaug research centre on corn and wheat, to see the evolution of wheat and corn over several thousands of years, and to discuss their desire to develop wheat and corn to help feed the nine billion people in the world.
I have a final comment here on this. We need to get our act together in Canada--and I think this point was made by the speaker we had--because the world is going to pass us by here, and Canadian farmers will lose on this. Recently we've seen other countries in the world, some of the ones I've talked about, going gangbusters on this technology with all the tools, biotechnological or otherwise. Australia is now into field trials on this. It may be ten or eleven years before they get anywhere, but we're close to having the world go by us on it. If you look at some of the research on wheat, it goes back in Canada. We were the breadbasket of the world. Can we not reclaim that glory in the interest of consumers and farmers? Western Canada was seen as the breadbasket of the world.
So the simple answer is it's technologically orphaned. There's a great opportunity there and an important opportunity in terms of feeding the world and developing drought tolerance and some of those important attributes.