Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Welcome to all of the witnesses. Thank you for being here today.
I'll turn to my friends from the Canadian Cattle Association first.
In the previous hour, we had a number of people who were experts in economics talking about the challenges that exist. It is a bit of a hypothetical area. One witness was quite sure that the European Union is nowhere near putting in a carbon border adjustment. I wanted to flip it. I was trying to turn the conversation towards how we measure the good that agriculture is doing. Certainly, we suffer from a lack of data, even just within Canada. I'm sure that problem is magnified several-fold when you're comparing international jurisdictions.
The Canadian Cattle Association set out some very ambitious goals. I think you've had some great partnerships with organizations like the Nature Conservancy of Canada. Also, you have shown how Canada's Prairies were great because of a symbiotic relationship with large herbivores. In fact, the grasslands suffered as soon as you started removing that. Cattle are now compensating for this traditional role that existed for thousands of years. You are identifying that data. You've set up your ambitious goals about how much carbon you want to sequester and so on.
Can you talk a little about the challenge that exists when comparing international jurisdictions? Let's take Brazil as an example. We know cattle farming in Brazil has, in many cases, come at the expense of the Amazon rainforest. In a jurisdiction like Brazil—if you were to put it on a par with Canada—would they have to measure the loss of carbon sequestration that came from the removal of forest to turn it into grassland?
Have you had conversations with international cattle organizations on how you might be able to set some kind of basic, commonly understood baseline?