Thank you, Mr. Dreeshen, for your question.
I'll talk a bit about the first part of your question, on bulk and refined products. When we talk of bulk processing, it's really cleaning the product and then shipping it in large quantities to port and off to the globe. These are the majority of the ways, for example, that peas are moved throughout our system in Canada. For refined products, we would love to see more value-added opportunities created within the Canadian sector. For us, when we look at value-added opportunities, it means fractionation. It means taking the pea, for example, and splitting it into the valuable components, such as protein, starch and fibre.
If we are able to do this type of fractionation eventually, we should be able to attain a higher-value product when we sell into the marketplace. With that type of refined product, if we had the opportunity to attract more companies into the Canadian industry interested in doing this—and it does take money, investment capital and other things, to attract companies—I think we would like to see it.
In Manitoba, we have Roquette coming in—they've broken ground—which is a large processor of fractionated product. We have others that hopefully will be attracted to coming to Canada. My colleague in Saskatchewan is currently in China, and he has had some excellent meetings talking to potential people who are interested in coming and perhaps setting up shop in Canada to do these types of fractionation methods.
For an update on our tariff challenges with our number one importing country, Canadian pulse producers are still subject to tariffs into India. We are under a restriction in terms of the amount of product even going into India. It's a quantitative restriction of 100,000 tonnes of product going in. That has been extended to September 30. At one point—I think it was at the end of August—there was one day when the Indian government lifted the restriction. It caused some excitement in the marketplace, but they immediately closed it down the next day.
The challenge we have with trade with countries like India and how they have treated Canada—and I'm going to say more than Canada, because globally they've inflicted this on many countries they import from—is that they are very unpredictable. This has become a challenge for exporters and farmers.
Initially, in November 2017, when they enacted their tariff on peas, the price dropped for producers by about $2 a bushel. What that equated to for us over the course of the year was an immediate pause for producers to decide what they put into the ground. They dropped their acres this past year. We went from 2.7 million metric tons of production in 2016-17 down to 2.1 million metric tons in 2017-18, and basically took about $300 million away from producers due to that change in access and pricing.
The situation with respect to India now is that we're still under reduced ability to export. We did have an Indian delegation last week with Pulse Canada, and they travelled through Canada to see our supply chain for pulse crops. They visited a farm. They visited a processing facility, and they went out to the port to see the full movement of the product through the marketplace.
While I haven't had an immediate update from Gordon Bacon of Pulse Canada on this, I feel it was really important for the Indian delegation to come out and see how we treat our product, to observe whether we have the problem weeds and things that they consider we have and that's why we would have to fumigate, and then to understand at the ports why we can't—