Just so everyone knows, the specific concern is that alfalfa pollinates through leafcutter bees, so it travels long distances—15 kilometres or so would be the set-aside area you would need to segregate GE alfalfa from regular alfalfa. Fifteen kilometres encompasses a lot of different farm operations in almost every region, so the scientific data shows that once you release Roundup Ready alfalfa, the whole of the alfalfa supply will eventually have some Roundup Ready in it. It would be impossible to prevent that.
That would mean farmers who farm organically, who are not allowed to have GE traits in their crops, would not be able to comply with the Canadian organic standard. We would have to either change the standard to allow that—at great risk to our market, because it's one of the claims we make as part of our value proposition—or just go out of business.
Now, on the other side, who is looking for Roundup Ready alfalfa? There isn't a great demand from the agricultural community. In fact, there's a downside to the agricultural community, because many of my neighbours use Roundup to kill alfalfa. They don't really want all their alfalfa contaminated with Roundup Ready alfalfa; that management technique will be lost to them. We've asked this question, but we haven't come up with a good answer.
If there were a valid, open dialogue involving the stakeholders, we would come to the conclusion that this has a lot of risks and downsides and has very little benefit to anyone, save maybe for the company that wants to market the product. In all honesty, I really think there's probably more of a need for them to just prove a point: nothing can be stopped in the world of biotech. They would see that as a sort of principle they want to maintain. When it comes to this one thing, if the government stood up to them, I think they'd be happy to back down and save the bad publicity.
To answer your question, we could come to an agreement on this relatively easily if we could get the right people in the room. If we look in good faith at what's best for agriculture on the whole and for the Canadian people, we can make some progress here, and maybe stay out of the philosophical polarization that tends to be a part of every discussion on biotech.