As we have discussed this morning, on the fishery subsidies issues it is extremely important that we pull out all stops across the different parts of government and government activities that are leading to what I think is an emerging crisis in the fishery internationally. We've certainly seen it manifest itself on the east coast of Canada, and we've seen issues arising on the west coast of Canada.
All of the work we're doing around rules will be one more arrow in the quiver of fisheries ministers who are trying to bring an international solution to the overharvesting problem in the international fishery. That will be extremely important for the protection of people who earn their livelihoods from the fishery. But as Randy Kamp has said, 85% of the fishery product in Canada is exported. The opportunities to open some very major markets in Europe, Japan, Korea, and China if we can get an agreement on non-agricultural market access will be extremely important.
We all like to look at the WTO and any trade agreement, because we see some little sector there where we're concerned that there's going to be a negative impact. But the World Trade Organization and the impact of a new trade agreement will be very positive across many sectors, and many of them are going to be related to agriculture and agrifood.
Historically in Canada we've acted as though the agriculture and resource industries are somehow not sophisticated, and we should be going up the value chain into high-tech everything. But the reality is that the fishery, agrifood, agriculture, mining sectors, and resource sectors have become high-tech sectors. They're going to be an extremely important part of Canada's economic future.
If we had a successful Doha round it would be, on balance, extremely beneficial. I think our negotiators have been doing God's work in performing miracles in the negotiating backrooms to ensure that potential negative effects are eliminated or strongly mitigated.