It was the same with the White House commission. The first series of testimonies were related to the technology and the vision and the direction that we should perhaps take. Three months later I was called back to testify again, and the entire day was spent on how to involve China. Given that China is a spacefaring nation on its own—they have 40,000 people in their mission control, which is more than any other nation—how do we work together, and what role does Canada want to play if we go in that direction? So there certainly is a lot of discussion and a lot of will at the highest level to do this kind of thing.
On the other hand, things are changing in space. We've been talking about exploration of asteroids and Mars, but also, just ten years ago, the resolution from satellites was about 30 metres. Today our RADARSAT-2 has a resolution of one metre. Optical satellites have a resolution of half a metre. Right now there are 70 Earth observation satellites orbiting the Earth. In ten years there will be about 300. It will really change how we do business, and I think Canada needs to stay at the forefront of this.
Take agriculture, for example. By using data from four different satellites—and we've done this with projects in P.E.I. and Saskatchewan—we can improve crop yields by 35% to 80%. Given that 13% of the GDP of this country is agriculture, that's $2 billion per year, even if you did it only at 10%. The challenge is to convince all farmers to use these assets, but the assets are there. There's a crossroads on what space can do for Earth and there's a crossroads on where we can go with respect to applications.
At the last space meeting, which was held in Korea—the next one is in Czechoslovakia—there were 72 countries involved. Just a few years ago, there were half that number. The number of emerging space nations is huge. Brazil is starting, and India is doubling its budget over the next two or three years, and t's because of this improvement in the quality of the data that we can provide for the benefit of Earth.
It's very important for us to take advantage of this emergence of the use of space. If there's one phrase I would like you to remember from a meeting such as this, it's that space should be an essential element of government infrastructure. If we do that, it will take us into the future. I talked to Gerry Ritz about all of this, and he became quite excited. When we departed, he shook my hand and said, “You know, Steve, this will take Canada's farming into the future. We need to do this kind of thing.”
However, there is a bureaucratic environment in Ottawa. There is a tremendous amount of support to do it, but to get it done in a timely fashion so that we can compete against the other nations is our challenge.