Thanks, Tom.
I'll start on slide 3. I probably won't touch on all of the slides, but we'll briefly go through a few of them.
Slide 3 demonstrates the agricultural sector's contribution to GDP. In 2018 it was $143 billion, making up 7.4% of total GDP. That includes the entire value chain, everything from input suppliers, such as fertilizer companies, all the way through primary and processing industries and including your restaurants and grocery stores.
We had a very strong decade in the agricultural sector leading up to 2018, setting income records for farmers in eight out of the ten years. Leading up to 2018, there was very strong global growth, we had good interest rates and exchange rates, and world prices were climbing pretty much the entire decade.
Leading into 2018, however, we saw a significant decline in farm income. That was due mainly to increases in expenses. Generally, every year we see some expense categories increase and other expense categories decrease. In that particular year they all increased, all at the same time. Despite the fact that we saw receipts on farms go up, expenses went up more significantly and led to an overall decline in income.
We don't have final numbers yet for the year that just finished, but for 2019 we are expecting to see a stabilization of farm incomes, and then, hopefully, a rebound leading into 2020.
Slide 4 goes into a little more detail, whereby you can see, across the board, those increases in expenses. There is no one expense that explains the overall increase; it really was spread across all categories of expenses.
Slide 5 shows the interconnected relationships along the entire value chain. I would also say here that the sector is very diverse. Depending upon the province or region you're in, different segments of the agricultural sector are more important, either in terms of products being developed or of whether that region is involved more in primary agriculture or in the processing sector.
Slide 6 shows a little bit of information about the department and how we function and indicates some of our priorities. I won't go through the slide in any detail, but it's there for your reference.
The case is the same with some of our minister's mandate letter commitments. Those can be found on slide 7.
In slide 8 we touch on our relationship with the provinces, as agriculture is a shared jurisdiction with the provinces. While the federal government has several levers to initiate change and to tackle various problems, we have to work in concert with the provinces, which have other levers. In going into changes to programs, for example, this is a relationship that's very important to maintain and build, in terms of both priorities moving forward and ways to tackle these matters.
With that, I'll switch over to Marco.