There are a number of what I would call unresolved technical barriers with the CETA agreement for the red meat sector in Canada.
We are extremely supportive of the agreement. Any market access is a very positive development for our industry. The challenge, though, is that it has to be meaningful market access, and that's what we're struggling with. For the beef sector in particular, where the use of a number of antimicrobial sprays is absolutely paramount in providing Canadians with food safety requirements to deal with E. coli and so forth, those treatments are not approved in the EU. Any product that goes through that process in Canada will not be able to be exported to the EU. For whatever beef plant is using those processes, there is really no access to the EU.
Our challenge here is that when we negotiated, we allowed them to come into our country with standards that are below ours. Ultimately our challenge probably with the agreement is they have full access to us, and what is their reason to now negotiate with us to accept our standards?
We're not going to give up on the sector. We are going to try to work with the industry to fund research to then support why these processing aids have no human health risk and are good from a food safety standpoint and so forth, but the industry is going to fund that. We certainly need government help and we need research. We are going to need to go to the EU to basically prove our point that these things are valid and appropriate processing aids. Doing that on our own, from our perspective, is not work that we should be having to do. The government got us the access to this market, and they need to create full access to this market rather than just having an agreement in principle with no ability for us to execute trade.