And safer products, definitely.
We're preventing it from happening because of these regulatory complexities.
One thing that is happening in the agrifood sector has to do with the advances of science. The advance of science is at a very fast pace, and these regulatory agencies are having problems catching up with it. They are missing also in capacity, with the enormous number of products, inputs, and technologies that need to be approved.
Our scholar-in-residence, Bruce Doern, will be publishing a volume this year talking about government labs. We've seen major cutbacks in government labs. We're there to look at the approvals, at testing these products and these inputs to make sure they are safe to the public and safe to the environment, but that they also could be commercialized, be sold in the marketplace, and be used by farmers and food processors. We miss that capacity. We need to invest a lot more and to address it. That's one item.
There are also multiple agencies that review the same products. That is another problem that needs to be resolved. You might have different jurisdictions with different standards, and sometimes I question the value of those different standards. Are they really true to the public safety, or are they just there to protect an industry? That's another factor that needs to be examined carefully.
Those would be the two main points: one, building capacity of our regulatory agencies so that they can actually review the products in a timely fashion; and secondly, getting rid of all the duplication that exists, to the extent we can, and stop the in-fighting and the silos that have been created over the years.