I understand what you're saying in terms of how the risk assessment information is generated. It is generated by the proponents, be that a private company, a public institution, or a university laboratory and so on. That's the system we have in Canada. It's exactly the same in all parts of the world, actually. The European Union is no exception. But it is the proponent's burden to prove that their products are safe by conducting research to generate information that's more or less dictated, in a sense, by the regulatory guidelines of the regulatory agencies, be it the CFIA or the European Food Safety Authority.
It's expensive to do that. It takes many years. There has been some discussion that, well, perhaps the taxpayer should pay for that in terms of independent research or through grants and so on through universities. From our members' point of view, fine, we have no problem with that. That said, a lot of our members actually do engage with universities and independent scientists to assist them in generating the very information that is delivered to the CFIA and Health Canada.
Currently we have a system where it's a bit of each. There is independent...although it's paid for indirectly by the industry, plus our member companies are also generating this information. So we already have a mixture of those two things.
I'd also submit that because of the interest in biotechnology from all sorts of directions, there's a lot of independent research going on as we speak, more and more now than there has ever been. The conclusion, as far as my reading is concerned, has always been very much the same: there have been no significant risks identified with these products, be it the independent research or be it the research of a company such as Monsanto.