Thank you.
I have to start by saying I'm not an expert on agricultural practices and supply relationships with the grocers. I've read reports of these fees and other barriers for smaller producers to have their products made available in major supermarket outlets.
On the other hand, I'm also aware, as one of your previous witnesses indicated, of the strong corporate or oligopolistic power among many food processing companies—not the farmers, but the manufacturers who throw their own weight around, if you like, in trying to extract surplus profits at that stage.
In cases where the supermarkets buy directly from smaller producers, then clearly those fees and other barriers would be a significant barrier to their participation in the retail industry. It would undermine farm incomes, certainly, and likely lead to higher prices for consumers.
Simply doing away with those fees in and of themselves may not lead to lower prices for consumers, given the obvious pricing power of the supermarket chains themselves. This is where I think measures aimed at reducing fees and other barriers on the input side to the supermarket stage of the food retail chain would have to be complemented by measures to try to ensure that those savings were indeed passed on to consumers, rather than ending up in even wider profit margins than we've already seen for the supermarkets.