I think the main challenge for whatever commodity—we represent over 150 different crops with our organization—when it comes to selling is having an oversupply. There can be an oversupply for many different reasons. It can be a bumper crop year. It can be a bumper crop year in Canada and in the United States.
I can give you an example. I'll go back to onions. The reason that I stick with onions is that it's one of the crops I grow, so I'm familiar with it. Because of the sanctions right now on Russia, the European onions, the onions from Holland, let's say, that would have gone into Russia can't go there. What the Dutch will do is subsidize transportation and move some of their onions to the Caribbean islands and some to the South Pacific.
Washington State is a large grower of onions in the United States, and if the Dutch access some of their markets in the Pacific by going out that way, then Washington State can't move their onions that way because of the transportation subsidies on the Dutch onions. Then the Washington onions get put on trains and go over to New York, and New York is a very important market for Ontario and Quebec onions. So the Washington onions come over, and even though we are in closer proximity, the Americans are very good at buying American first, and they would bring over those Washington onions.
Then we don't have the access to that 35% or 40% of the export market we need. Those onions now stay within the province. Now we have to fight, and the price keeps dropping because the farmers are scared that they won't be able to move those onions and they'll start rotting. They say, “Well, we had better take a cheap price rather than have to pay to dump them.”
You can see how trade is important and how the global intricacies of how it all works can really affect us, right back to the province.