First of all, thank you, Mr. Vincent.
The slaughterhouses are primarily Canadian owned and Canadian controlled. That's on the pork side. On the beef side, they are largely U.S. owned. I think we do have a challenge to reach the levels of scale of some of the U.S. companies. At the same time, we are facing some costs that the U.S. don't have. We have costs of inspection. We have costs of certifying exports, which our U.S. competitors don't have. Certainly that has affected the competitiveness of our industry vis-à-vis the U.S.
We have increasing foreign ownership in our value chain at the retail level. For example, Costco, as far as we can understand, buys their meat from one supplier. As a result, all of the pork in Costco stores seems to be U.S. pork. We are having to work at that, because certainly U.S. product has become much more competitive in our market. That's why there's increasing interest in a Canadian branding program, not one that is mandatory, but one that does enable us to make it more apparent to consumers whose product they are purchasing.
As I mentioned, there are definitely increased imports from the U.S. They've become far more competitive on the world market. I think we really have quite a number of areas in which we will have to continue to work with governments to address that gap in competitiveness, which is attributable to regulations and some other issues.