I certainly could give you a perspective. In our company, our whole founding, as with many SMEs today, was on a basis of origin-based processing.
When we look at the creation of value in our sector and in many other sectors, we're really looking at how we differentiate our products to take them higher up the value chain and create wealth and jobs and opportunity here. When I was a young trade officer in the Saskatchewan government, lentils were a crop that was growing in acreage in western Canada. In Canada we were only cleaning the sticks, stones, dirt, and dust from this product and shipping all of the value to other markets, where they were splitting, processing, and making food products out of them. Our vision was about how we could build processing plants at the origin and how we could brand our products to take advantage of the high-quality reputation and the food safety that we can deliver from the Canadian marketplace.
When I look at the overall value-creation proposition, I think we all have to recognize one thing: we are an economy that is heavily weighted to commodities today. The opportunity that exists is all about creating products and finding market niches within the large number of emerging markets in the world where people will pay an economic value that makes it viable for us to do it here.
I just returned last week from India. India is the largest consumption market in the world for pulse crops—lentils, peas, chickpeas. In terms of the quality standards in these emerging markets, as incomes rise, the quality standards are going higher. This is playing directly into what I consider to be a Canadian competitive advantage, in that we are able to be very competitive because our raw materials are of very high quality and we have very strong technology. We have developed highly mechanized systems for creating safe food products that are put into tamper-proof containers and shipped to 108 countries around the world. We see these types of opportunities existing in manufactured goods, we see them in the agricultural value-added sector, and we see them in all other types of sectors.
On the free trade agreement side, though, as you say, it's well and good to sign agreements, but we want a commercialization framework to identify sectors of the economy that can benefit from enhanced market access and tariff-level playing fields that have been created as a result of that.
In our committee we have been urging DFAIT to develop a framework. It could be revised agreement by agreement, but it would be at least a general framework of awareness of the agreement and provide identification of key sectors of opportunity. A road map for commercialization success is a critical element in showing that benefit, not only to the large companies but also to companies that are creating jobs in regions all over this country.
We see ourselves as a company that others can look to, a company that has done it. We're an example.