Certainly you can start with as pure as you can possibly get, but seeds will lay dormant in the soil for, in some cases, up to four or five years until the right germination conditions exist.
For example, you could have a GM variety of canola, two years later you could be growing wheat to export, and you would get a little bit of GM canola showing up in your wheat shipment simply because no combine is capable of containing 100% of the seeds it harvests. Some will go through the system and still exist. Frequently fowl will come in and land in a field in the fall and eat, leaving a variety of seeds. Certainly we spray to control these as much as possible, but in large fields, as we said, you can't control for everything at zero.
You will get minute additions to that 0.25%. One way to get around that at the bulk storage level is to dedicate facilities, and that starts to become a little bit less economical. As a farmer, I could have one bin that I only use for GM canola, and an elevator could say, well, we have one part of our terminal that's only going to be used for canola. That's not very economical for them, because that means it might not be full all the time, or it's only partially full, whereas if they could use it for wheat they could have a higher volume within their terminal.
You could start to have a dedicated facility, but that's a bit of a duplication of effort. You have added cost and it's inefficient. Who pays for that? The importer's probably not going to pay for that. Who ends up paying for that? It's likely the farmer. It would reduce the profitability of farmers to have these types of dedicated systems.
On the trade side, we've discussed this a great deal at the University of Saskatchewan. With the increasing number of GM traits to come over the next five to ten years, I think until the WTO makes a decision on this, you're going to see countries, and particularly the European Union, manipulating this to the best of their ability until somebody—Canada or the States, or together with Argentina—takes this as a complaint to the WTO.
That's a lengthy and expensive process, and there's no guarantee as to what the outcome will be. Until the WTO renders a decision, I think this trade of LLP and minute detection of GM will continue to be a trade irritant until we get a decision on it.