Mr. Chairman, thank you for the opportunity to speak with you here today.
I am the chairman of the United Potato Growers of Canada. Our farm operates a growing and fresh pack operation delivering potatoes on a daily basis to chain stores and, in the past, to food service, when it existed.
I echo the comments that have been made today. Although we are grateful for the dollars that the Prime Minister has allocated to the potato and poultry industries, unfortunately the potato industry has less than half of what it needs to facilitate moving to market the flood of potatoes that we now have available.
As the government searches for methods of doing things, there was an announcement to put these potatoes through food banks or in cattle feed, but I'm not certain that the logistics on that have been worked out very well. Certainly, as Kevin mentioned, potatoes have a shelf life and have to be.... If we bring processing potatoes into our packaging plant, about 50% to 70% of the yield will be packaged. In other words, there's a huge shrink to them, so we have a lot of potatoes that don't have a home in a fresh pack that make it into processing, because they have more uses at the processing level.
Having said that, with the problems they have had in western Canada with the feedlots or the meat packing plants, there's a backup of cattle on the farms, so I think we need to be careful about making assumptions that these potatoes can go to cattle. Some of them can, but some must be disposed of.
The more important thing is that the money gets distributed fairly among the provinces. I would like to make a recommendation that the fastest and most effective way to do this is through the provincial governments, in turn through the potato boards in the various provinces. We should take their advice on how to use the money, because each province has a different situation. Certainly, one size does not fit all clear across the country, especially today in the heavy processing sectors in, for example, New Brunswick, Manitoba and Alberta. They have been especially hit hard with processing extra potatoes.