Thank you, Mr. Chair. I will keep my comments quite short.
I represent the Canadian Canola Growers Association, and we are members of CAFTA. Liam has given a quick overview of CAFTA's position, and we wholeheartedly support that.
The Canadian Canola Growers Association represents about 60,000 growers across Canada from B.C., Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Ontario, and that covers 95% of the canola growers in Canada. So we are the national association representing those growers, specifically.
We believe strongly that there are significant opportunities for liberalized trade in this round of WTO negotiations, and it's critical that we get a good deal, an aggressive deal, on all three pillars.
Every year we produce, on average, about seven million tonnes of canola. Last year was a big year. We produced over nine million tonnes, and the farm gate value of that canola was about $2 billion to $2.5 billion for our growers. It's a significant and important cash crop for grains and oilseeds producers in Canada. It can make up anywhere from half to a third of a farmer's gross revenue in any given year.
It's a going concern out there, and it creates in the whole industry about $11 billion in economic activity every single year. But we depend heavily on trade. About half our seed production is exported as seed. Of the other half, which we crush here in Canada, we consume about half--not even half--of that as oil in Canada. The other half of that oil is exported. Then of course we export meal, in addition to consuming some of that domestically.
The point is that canola is extremely heavily dependent on the international market, whether we're shipping it abroad or crushing it here at home. The price is set on the world market. And it doesn't matter where it goes; the law of one price holds. So any distortion in the international market for canola ends up hitting us here in Canada.
As I mentioned, the international marketplace is distorted by subsidies and tariffs, and these are costing us real dollars every single day. Estimates are that trade-distorting domestic subsidies cost Canada's grains and oilseeds sector about $1.3 billion every year, and tariffs and quotas are costing us another $1.2 billion, again, every year. And those estimates are from independent studies. One was done by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and the other was done by the George Morris Centre.
If you put that in a canola perspective, what is canola's share of that pain? On the domestic support and export issues, it's costing us about $37 a tonne, so typically, if we produce about seven million tonnes, it costs us approximately $260 million. And that's just on the domestic support pillar.
On the tariffs and quotas it's costing about $77 for every tonne of canola. Multiply that by seven million tonnes and it's about $540 million. What we are leaving on the table every single year, just from canola, is about $800 million, and that's just one commodity in this country that relies on the export market. There are other examples for barley. There are other examples for wheat and flour, and so on.
That is a lot of money. I actually calculated this for what happens on my farm in terms of my own production. On the family farm that I'm part of, we typically harvest about 285 tonnes of canola every single year. Multiply that by the $37, and that's $10,500, just on domestic support issues, that it's costing me personally on my farm.
On the tariffs and quotas of $77 a tonne, if you apply that to the 285 tonnes that I produce, it's $22,000. The total bill on my particular farm is $32,500, and I'm just one of 60,000.
So there is a tremendous opportunity here. I'm not here to say that we need to drive subsidies down to zero or that we're here to drive tariffs down to zero. I know that's not realistic, but what I am here to say is that surely to goodness, an aggressive round can bring some of that $32,000 that's leaking out of my pockets every year because of the international distortions back to Canada.
So with that, I would like to turn it back to you, Mr. Chair. And thank you very much for the invitation to appear before your committee today.