I echo what Rick has said. Allow the commercial marketplace to operate as it should, with as little government regulation as possible. It's very important that this be allowed to occur.
On the barley side, in our study that the Western Barley Growers just completed, we identified some areas that we thought could be encouraged. One is that we have to encourage an accurate market and price discovery mechanism. We have to track the movement of barley from farmer to whatever end user who purchases a product, so we have some idea about the supply: what is grown, what's being used, what's left in the system. It's really hard for price discovery if you can't track the movement of the barley as it moves through the value chain. That's very important.
Right now one of the difficulties we see in the barley industry is the lack of a good price discovery mechanism and a risk management mechanism that the industry can use. Certainly the Barley Council of Canada will be working with the industry to try to work that out.
I think the encouragement of private-public research is very important. There are private companies that are willing to invest in research on wheat and barley in western Canada. If we can find a way to encourage a partnership between the publicly funded and the privately funded research it will work best for Canadian agriculture. Certainly I would encourage the government to encourage that partnership.