Agriculture in Canada continues to be a major driver of our economy. Some 8% of our GDP is agriculture related—one in eight jobs—so it's very significant. That's why we take it seriously and continue to make investments, strategic investments that will help build the sector and help it build itself. Marketing is the answer.
Net cash income last year, as I said in my opening remarks, was over $13 billion and was up significantly. It's setting a record in 2012, and 2013 looks good as well. We're assessing other crops around the world and so on.
The biggest thing to me, though, was that you always hear how it was great for incomes to go up, but expenses went nuts and took away all of that. The numbers actually show us that as incomes went up 12%, costs, or inputs, went up 3%. There's still a good margin of 9% there. That's very positive when it comes to allowing producers to have access to the market.
You've made mention of the changes to the old Canadian Wheat Board. We've seen significant changes in western Canada. We've had announcements of some value-added. One of them's on hold right now, but I understand that it's going to move ahead here in the next months and so on. That's good.
That said, there's always more work to be done. I continue to have meetings with the CWB as they work out a system that will take them into the private sector. It looks extremely good. They've had a number of people court them. Looking at the Rolodex they have internationally; they may not be handling the same amount of money in the pools, but they've been able to sell two boatloads of canola to a market in Japan that we had never had before. They're flexing their muscles and experiencing some freedom in allowing them to do different things as well.
It's great news for western Canada and it's great news for Canada overall that we have access to growing and emerging markets in the Asia-Pacific area. We look with envy at the hundreds of million of people in Europe who have the capacity to buy the quality and consistency of supply that Canadians produce. The more people you have bidding on your product, the better off you're going to be.