Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Good afternoon, gentlemen.
You just referred to the Doha Round. Clearly things went a little sour in the agriculture file. I'd like to come back to farming and Quebec's hog and pork industry. As Mr. Julian said, the Free Trade Agreement with the United States has adversely affected our employees' working conditions. Prices are more or less controlled in the pork industry which means that companies like Olymel, instead of increasing productivity, have had to cut wages and ask for sacrifices of as much as 30%, in order to survive. It took a lot of votes for the proposal to carry.
What's more, companies like Monsanto, that claim they have pig patents, are going to make sure they control things and seek to impose a charge on all every hog produced. Some companies and multinationals are looking at going a lot further and a lot faster than some other businesses. As part of our negotiations, could we create a separate category for agriculture, particularly with respect to planning and competition, in order to protect each country's food sovereignty? You could specify that once this particular condition was met, the rest would follow.