We spent a lot of time dialoguing with the food processors, the sweetener users in the U.S., because they're our allies. Obviously they have interest in sustaining access to imports when they need them. We meet quite regularly with the United States Department of Agriculture and perhaps less frequently with the U.S. Trade Representative. Those are the two agencies that affect our access.
Most recently, since the Farm Bill.... I mentioned we lost access for beet thick juice. We tried to avert that. It started out as a bill and then it got incorporated into the Farm Bill. We were unsuccessful. So then we looked for other avenues to offset that. That was about a 35,000-tonne sugar equivalent, which was very significant for the Alberta plant. So we looked for other opportunities to offset that loss. I mentioned that the plants in the west are under capacity, so it's very important.
We were meeting with the USDA and USTR yesterday to talk about their administrative management of their import quota. They're under more restrictions now with the Farm Bill, which is making it more difficult to import sugar when they need it. They have a pretty serious shortage in the market, a temporary shortage in the market that is likely to be seen more seriously in the spring. So we're there in advance to try to encourage them to look at mechanisms to import high-quality sugar from countries like Canada. We're not asking for a special privilege for Canada, but just to enable the imports, to bring them in where they need to go. We have had some proposals, and we're going to be looking to the Canadian government to give us more support in pressuring those U.S. agencies to use some of those mechanisms.