Thank you. There are two points I would like to make.
The first is when I was referring to strategies that allow the various entities to work together through a continuum. The opportunity this presents is that the people at the front end doing the research have more opportunity to identify or to find out what the identified needs are at the working end of the producer, the processor, or the other industry members. We've sometimes lost that continuum. Perhaps we've had good research, but it hasn't been directed to where we need to be going. That's one of the points I want to make.
The second point is that we in Canada perhaps have a little bit of difficulty around how we manage IP--I think I'll put it that way. As a result, we sometimes see avoidance of getting into that pitfall because it's a huge human resource effort to move something through to commercialization. I think you've witnessed that probably within the ranks of AAFC, and we've witnessed it in the universities. Where it has worked very cleanly, very well, has been in areas like variety development, plant breeding programs. I think that is working well. In some cases we can say the same thing where IP is moving directly into a processing system. There are other examples, new assessment tools for environmental assessment, or other examples where it hasn't been that easy to move forward. That's one thing I'd like to share with you.
The types of issues we're addressing in agriculture are not simply focused on the identification of intellectual property for commercialization if we want to be successful. There are practices and processes that are very important to the operation of our farms and our primary and secondary processors that don't necessarily even need to go through that kind of process. What they need is the opportunity to bring new tools in so they can address the market as the market changes, or address the environmental elements as those elements change. To some extent what we want to do is be able to move forward on good practice and processes, for example, on green processing technologies, not necessarily to patent and protect, but rather to allow industry to pick up on it and use it as quickly as possible. So we have a few barriers there.