That's a great question, thank you for that.
The area of innovation doesn't stop at the production. The control innovation is a critical area for us in CFIA. Indeed we have moved in a number of areas to much more modern DNA-based techniques that require much smaller samples to assess things like pest risk.
Unfortunately that's not possible across the board. One of the examples that I know creates frustration in the potato industry is PCN, potato cyst nematode, testing because we collect fairly significant samples. It's also a problem for us as an agency. We continue to explore innovation in identifying that pest because, as you can imagine, collecting and shipping hundreds of pounds of soil across the country and then managing that in our laboratories is not a simple task for us either.
This is an area that the industry has been very interested in. We too are very interested but we also have to recognize that it's not just our drivers in innovation. Any test that we shift to must be acceptable internationally. We carry out that surveillance to provide assurance to our trading partners that pests that may be present in Canada on a limited basis are not present in the products that are being exported, to assure them that they are not being exposed to that pest. Many of those specific tests aren't just because that's what CFIA would like to do, they are the international standard tests and we are obligated to do them until a new test is accepted internationally.