I think one of the issues that we're facing is that.... In psychology, they call it cognitive dissonance. This is such a huge issue that people are having a hard time getting their heads around it. The disease has been around a long time, and it's in China and so on. What's happened, though....
There are two factors. One is that half the world's pigs live in China. They've lost more in their production than we produce in total in North America, so the Chinese travel now. There's a huge trade connection with China. The U.S. buys a lot of its ingredients for its swine business from China. The second is that we're very dependent on trade, as Martin pointed out. In Manitoba, 90% of our stuff is exported out. If one market alone.... If Japan does not accept our pork, we're done.
To me, we need to start the process of getting financial programs in place so that producers on day one know where they stand.
I was involved in flood disaster assistance programs for many, many years when I worked for the department of agriculture in Manitoba. If we have these plans in advance, people know what to do. We don't want to be sitting on day one having a discussion about whether negative margins are covered under the AgriStability program, while producers are trying to get a hold of their accountants to find out what their cash positions are. This would be an absolutely ridiculous situation.
We need to start thinking it out now. Our basic hope is that this disease will never happen. We've had foot-and-mouth disease in Paraguay. It's been endemic there for many, many years. The last case that we had was in Saskatchewan in 1952. We can keep this disease out, I think, but if we do get a case, we need to have programs in place to be able to handle it. That's what we're trying to get across.