Here are a couple of comments. First of all—and it may be the answer to this other gentleman too—you have to remember that there are some GMOs that really you have to accept and that there's no controversy over. BT Cotton, for example, was a huge breakthrough. You don't consume cotton, so there's no controversy on some of these. You can't let the problem with categorizing in general.... There are some real success stories just like this.
But on the food thing, I think there are huge areas yet to be done with respect to breeding rices that aren't GMO rices. This is a huge area, but IRRI, etc. are working on some different type of rices, and they're also trying to develop the iron content in the rice. I think it will have a huge payoff.
The other thing is, I believe more in the Chicago school of economics. I'm not a government interventionist type, necessarily. Markets usually take care of themselves. We've always had poor people, starving people. That's almost a different area from our trying to feed the world in what we do—population growth, etc.—because we have commercial demand, and somebody has to pay for this food yet.
We had a conference two years ago, and everybody asked the same question—where is this food market headed?—when wheat futures got over $12 a bushel and we thought we farmers were going to live in heaven forever. All of a sudden the markets all collapsed, until this spring. Now we're back into this price spiral. But you see, that isn't all necessarily with technology; it's also with respect to government policy, because government policy at one time got involved also in holding food stocks. They avoid all this instability.
Then we dropped that argument under the U.S. Farm Bill, whereby now we're no longer required to hold wheat when the prices get below what they call the loan rate. That's something we should look into too in relation to this food crisis. It isn't all on increasing supply and trying to increase production; it's also to do with management and what we do with this huge weather instability that's out there at the present.
But I have a forecast: don't buy a bunch of farmland in Saskatchewan on the basis of these prices that exist at the present time.