Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Members of the committee, first I'm going to provide an overview of the situation. You have a summary, which we've sent to you in both languages. I'll mostly stick to that summary. I hope to stay within the five minutes that are allotted us.
First, I'm going to talk to you about the income crisis. The net income crisis that farmers are currently experiencing is undeniably much more structural than circumstantial. The opening of markets and increased consumer demands create an economic movement favouring the concentration of agri-food players upstream and downstream from the farm. All these phenomena exercise downward pressure on profit margins of farm businesses.
Declining incomes have led to growing indebtedness of farms in Canada, resulting in a deterioration of their financial structure. Furthermore, as shown by Tables 1 and 2, which are presented in the summary, Canada's situation is deteriorating relative to that of the United States.
If you look at Figure 1, you'll see that the trend curve of net income has completely changed since 1996, whereas the Americans had a curve that was slightly below ours. Their net income growth has continued, whereas ours has completely declined. That has obviously had an impact on net assets.
Chart 2 shows that net assets have deteriorated in Canada relative to the United States. Obviously, poor income results and higher indebtedness; that's the explanation.
It's clear that energy costs, BSE and the exchange rate have impacted negatively on most farm sectors, particularly grain and hog production. The grain sector, for example, has been unable to recover from the prolonged period of low prices, particularly due to the subsidies paid to American farmers under the Farm Bill. As a consequence, the monetary balance of Quebec grain farms has fallen from a $20,000 surplus per farm in 1996 to a $6,200 deficit in 2005. According to the Canada Border Services Agency, the Farm Bill has an impact of about...
Am I going too quickly?