I want to be really clear on this point. You won't find in any of the documents we issued, and certainly not in the one on agrifood and the importance of identifying key strategic sectors, a recommendation with respect to supply management. We were quite clear in not making a recommendation about it.
Why? Because it is, in and of itself, a highly complex subject. It's not something that you can leap to conclusions about one way or the other. It's something that requires a lot of intensive study in and of itself.
Our focus in making the recommendations that we did was actually a bit different from that. What we're trying to encourage government to think about, or people in general to think about, and all of you to think about, is more around issues of how Canada can move up the value chain.
How can Canada, in the agrifood sector, do more value-added processing than we do today? About 50% of our agricultural exports have some processing component, but 50% don't. Because that processing is good in terms of creating value and creating jobs, what more can we do there? What more can we do in terms of enhancing the technology and being more technologically sophisticated in the agrifood sector? What more could we do creatively around branding Canada as a source of nutritious, safe food in a world that's hungry?
Our focus was on what other trade agreements we could enter into that would give us access to hugely important markets for Canadian agricultural products, such as China, India, and Japan. Our focus was on what more we can do to take this industry that has so much potential, clear its path, and encourage it to grow as fast as it can and to export as much as it can.
Hold onto your hats on this one, but we export less in terms of agricultural products than Holland. Now, you can take your hat off to the Dutch. They have a very small country, but it's a very small country that's managed to marshal its resources and build an extremely capable agricultural sector. What we're saying is that if the Dutch can do it, why can't Canada do it?