Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Minister and officials, for coming.
Clearly, none of us has experience in international negotiations, so we appreciate your coming and helping us understand a little bit better how things are going there and the process.
Let me begin, and then if there's time left, my colleagues might have some questions as well.
You kind of referred to it in your most recent comments, but let me make some general comment and question. What's surprising to me is that the WTO is talking about fisheries subsidies at all. One could argue that it's primarily an environmental issue rather than a trade issue. Although all of us have some serious concerns about elements in the chairman's draft text and we rightly raise those as major concerns, I think it's possible that we can lose sight of the fact that fisheries subsidies are part of the problem leading toward overfishing and eventually perhaps to some very serious problems with fisheries resources around the world.
Do you have any comments on either of those?