Thank you for your generosity, and thank you for your kind words. It's really good for us to see for ourselves that we are doing something useful within our region and that we are appreciated by partners, and as I started saying, by like-minded countries.
Jordan is making the demining efforts while we still have countries that are negotiating peace. We are pushing for peace with the one side, and we are also working on the ground by demining and through other participation.
We don't like to compare free trade agreements, but our whole concept is to increase our partnerships with the United States, with the EU, and of course with Canada. I remember in 2000, when we signed our free trade agreement with the U.S., that there was a study in the United States saying that this amount of trade would be insignificant to the United States. Now, after 10 years, there is a report listing Jordan as 78th on the list of the United States' partners in free trade. Seventy-eight out of 200 is a good number for us.
Even if you look at Jordan-Canada trade before the free trade agreement, we have tripled in that time the amount of trade we have between us. We know that sometimes bureaucrats sit and negotiate and talk and set things on paper, but we know that we have a very active private sector and we work in a market economy. Our economies are close and the banking systems in our countries originated from the same system, so I know that many levels are going to be there to trade.
You mentioned, if the expression is right, that we are here to sell Jordan. At the same time, it's a small region. If you drive from the northern part of Jordan to the southern part, you'll cross to Saudi Arabia before somebody driving from Ottawa would make it to Windsor. We are a very small country, but being small gives us manoeuvrability and movability in the region.
Our trade relations with Iraq have been established for a long time. Many countries, as you have heard in previous sessions, have their embassies located in Amman. They cover Iraq at the same time.
Our other neighbour to the south is Saudi Arabia. It's part of the GCC countries, the Gulf Cooperation Council countries. Our neighbours to the north are Syria and Turkey, so our position is a linking point between Europe and the Gulf States.
As we are a small country, it would be easy to have a railway that could connect all these areas together. We have no problem talking to any of our neighbours. As I mentioned, the 77 countries we have our agreements with include, of course, Israel, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and all our extended neighbours.
Almost everybody, as we said, speaks English in Jordan, so it won't be hard, and of course you'll find people in Jordan who speak French, so the infrastructure is there. I'm sure that our private sectors on both sides will be very creative in expanding the volume of trade between us.