Absolutely. I think it's important that we not couch this and say we need to hit these environmental targets, and so in order to do that we must produce less. Nobody wants that. We have very aggressive export targets set out in the Barton report and the economic round table. I think it's important. My family is from rural southwestern Ontario. We believe it's the economic opportunity for these communities.
I think these opportunities come in three areas. The first is increased yield and lower costs with the better use of fertilizer, use of technology, just producing more or producing more value on the same plot of land. I think that's the first opportunity.
The second opportunity is creating greener products. We've heard about organic. Agriculture is by its nature a sort of low-margin industry, but if there are ways that we can differentiate our products as being more green, which in many cases we are—our wheat has one of the lowest carbon footprints in the world—and if we can use that when exporting and our international customers are willing to pay more for our wheat because it has a lower greenhouse gas footprint, that creates opportunity.
Third, if we can develop new technologies, again whether it be for fertilizer use or genomics or anything else, this will create a set of intellectual property that we can use to export. We've heard people like Jim Balsillie talk about the opportunities connected with creating IP in Canada. Instead of constantly being the importer of these technologies, we can export those technologies.
Ideally I would like to see those technologies manufactured in southwestern Ontario, where I'm from, but either way, if we own that intellectual property, that creates economic opportunities for all of Canada.
