Well, you raise an excellent question: what do you do if you have a wharf full of lobsters and nowhere to get rid of them? It is a fundamental question, and one that very well may be faced by the fishermen this spring.
I would suggest there are two things that you in government could really have a positive influence on. One is the effort that's going on by CCFI and by the provincial governments and what not--in other words, to market an Atlantic Canada lobster, promote it, try to find new markets, new products, these sorts of things. These take time and they take effort and money and investment, but that is one part you should be looking at.
I think another thing the government should be looking at, whether it's working with their provincial colleagues or whatever vehicle they wish to use, is securing some interim funding for the processors in order for them to be able to purchase lobsters. We heard earlier that they have a supply. I don't know the quantity of inventory in hand. They were bought at higher prices, $4 or $5 a pound. Therefore they're very expensive inventory for our processors to handle.
We heard of the collapse of the Icelandic and other banking systems. Banks have become extremely sensitive to the processing sector in lending money. We can see that processors today are tightening up their lines of credit with their clients, with their fishermen and what not. It's not as easy for them to lend money for new motors or new gear and various other activities as it was a few years ago.
So I think that between the provincial and federal governments there should be an effort to have some type of financial assistance, whether it's an interest buydown, which would be positive, or a loan of a certain percentage of their money for inventory, let's say, a 70% return of their inventory. They have to have some incentive to maintain the product and sell it, but at the same time, if they could just buy one week and not buy the second week, we're into the same sort of situation.
We look at our forefathers in the government. Many years ago we had the Fisheries Prices Support Board. Now, I know Lawrence has mentioned the World Trade Organization and about the various trade agreements that we have and the problems that ensue, but at the same time, the vision was there that during low times the Fisheries Prices Support Board could support the industry. If we could have something like that, so that our processors are not forced to dump product on the market at low prices and depress the market even further, I think it would be helpful to them.
I'm not trying to put myself forward as a marketing expert, because I'm going to tell you I certainly am not. If you want to talk to marketing experts, you go into that field and talk to the processors. Those people are the people who handle that side of things. But having looked at it this winter—I had an opportunity to do a bit of work on this—what I found was quite startling. If we do not have some mechanism to start the buying process off and to recover money relatively quickly, the fishermen are going to soon find that there's no place to sell a lobster—and you, Peter, have brought up a very poignant point—and it's going to immediately kill the industry if we can't get them off the wharves.
So my recommendation would be those two things: one is to help on inventory management and costs, and as well, to look at some banking and maybe interest buydown, those types of things, to assist the industry in keeping it churning and turning over.