For live inventory, we do have a system that we run with the AVC Lobster Science Centre in Charlottetown, where we have 12 or 13 companies submitting on a weekly basis what their live inventory is in pounds, from their tank houses. The last figure I saw, I think last Friday, was an extrapolation from those 12 companies, with an estimate of about two million live pounds.
Where does that stand versus the last two years? Two years ago we almost ran out of lobster, and we hit $15 a pound. Trying to pull some lobsters out of the water at those high prices really cut us up in the market; a lot of restaurants took lobster off the menu because of that high price.
So we're somewhere between where we were two years ago and where we were last year. The last graph that I saw showed it had flattened out and was starting to hold its own; it wasn't going down further. So I think we have a moderate inventory of live lobster right now.
If you're asking the question about processed product, that's a very important question, because, as I said, out of the 60 million pounds we expect to be landing this spring and early summer, 30 million pounds have traditionally gone to the processing sector in P.E.I. and New Brunswick. So whether or not they buy that 30 million pounds is very important. Let's say they only buy half of that, because of their high inventories; and if we dump the rest onto the live market, it will depress the price.
So we don't have an inventory system. It's up to those companies, I guess. Maybe Mr. MacAulay might have a better understanding of where those guys stand—Ocean Choice, and some of those companies—with their inventory.
I've been told that popsicle packs of frozen boiled lobster are a problem. They have pretty heavy inventory of them.