I think the future looks good. They're a very solid, strong commercial entity across Canada. There are some small cheese producers. I was quite happy to see a lot of them come out and say they're already winning awards in Europe for their Canadian cheese and they're not scared of going head to head with the European cheese that will eventually come in here, the 16,000 tonnes of cheese plus some industrial cheese and so forth. At the end of the day, I'm not scared of the competition on their behalf, and they've been telling me they're not scared of the competition either.
The concern will be with whoever handles the allocation of quota on that tonnage of cheese coming in. Discussions as to the best way to handle that are ongoing. We have to be concerned that whatever model we put in play the Europeans will use to handle predominantly our pork and beef as well as other agricultural commodities. So there's some work to be done in that regard.
The Prime Minister early on said that, should there be negative impact on our dairy or our processing sector, the federal government would pick up that point. We're in discussions and we've had some good discussions with the Dairy Farmers of Canada, working through the Canadian Dairy Commission with Jacques Laforge and his team. We've also been working with Laurent Pellerin at the National Farm Products Council on how you quantify and how to set a benchmark now to show that there are fluctuations as that cheese begins to come in.
We're working out the final details with the European Union on the science-based side of the trade. Steve Verheul is very well versed in agricultural issues as well as in trade overall, so I trust him implicitly to make sure there are no non-phytosanitary or non-science-based tariff walls behind what we're taking down. Those talks are ongoing. Those are the final little details that take time to get right. But it's worth that time investment to make sure we get them right.
So at the end of the day, we'll have to set a benchmark working with the dairy industry and with the provinces as to where we are today and how that would be affected negatively or positively. The growth we're talking about in Canada right now when it comes to yogourt manufacturing and cheese and all of those different things that affect the farmers' bottom line is very positive. There's good solid growth. So I think there's every intention that the amount of cheese coming in from Europe will be absorbed into a growing market. There's more consumption out there than there was, so we'll start to see that happen.