I think there's a perception that the EU is very much against genetically modified plants and certainly the extent of cultivation of such plants in the EU is very small. I think there are like 200,000 hectares of genetically modified corn grown in Spain and, actually, that's growing as each year goes by, but it's pretty modest compared to North America.
The reality is the Europeans really embrace biotechnology inasmuch as livestock feed—in other words, quite a large proportion of the corn and soybeans in North America and portions of that come from Canada—is exported to the EU to support their livestock feed industry. They demand it. The problem we have is that from time to time there will be a new corn product or a soybean product that's developed in Canada. Farmers want to access the technology, grow those varieties, but the particular trait, characteristic, however you want to describe it, hasn't yet been approved in the EU.
They have a slightly different system in the EU, where they approve things for like five years and then the approval expires, so sometimes these products sort of expire in terms of their registration. Canadian farmers are getting caught because they want to grow varieties of corn and soybeans, but it's kind of a losing playing field as to which ones they can put in the ground vis-à-vis how they're going to be received in the EU. That speaks to the low-level presence policy.
As you probably well know, the Canadian government is bravely proposing a low-level presence policy—and that's still under development—but, more importantly, they're embracing conversations with other countries, like-minded countries, that also have interests in agriculture and innovation and biotechnology as well. At the moment, it's been difficult to get the EU governments to engage in those conversations. The fact that we have this working group sort of enshrined, so to speak, in CETA gives us, in my view, a very good avenue to be able to start having conversations around lower-level presence with the European Union counterparts.