Mr. Chair, I want to first thank the witnesses for being here.
First of all, Mr. Georgetti, I just want to say I'm very surprised, of course, that you haven't heard of all the support that's out there for free trade agreements in general. There's certainly a lot of support for our companies and for agriculture here in Canada. Your organization may not have a lot of farmers in it or people who work in agriculture, although I'm sure there probably are people who work in agribusiness of some kind, or at least a spinoff from it, but I can tell you that when this committee was in Colombia, it was unbelievable where some of the support for a free trade agreement came from.
I believe it was on the first day we were there that we drove out of Bogota, and in Sincelejo we met with a number of representatives, with the UN and what have you. What really stuck with me is that we met with a group of eight or nine displaced people, all of them women, except for one man who was with them.
I can remember that one of our members here, Ms. Murray, asked a direct question of them: “Would a free trade agreement with Canada affect displaced people in a negative way or a positive way?” Their exact comments were: “Yes, it would benefit us; absolutely it would.” I wrote the words down at the time. I don't have them in front of me, but I have them in my office.
Those displaced people, if there is anybody who, short of being killed, has gone through hell.... The husbands of most of the women we talked to had been killed by, basically, the drug industry—drug lords and what have you. It was, “Either leave the land or we'll kill you”, and that's what happened. So those women got out.
My point is that somebody who has gone through that kind of strife in their life—