No. I don't want to be too hard on the embassy staff. The individuals and certainly the trade officers scattered around Japan have been great. It's only that it was discouraging at first.
The biggest issue was that we did get caught one time with a residue. It was allowable but it was something we didn't know about—it was simply a seed treatment on the canola—and it showed up the next year in the seed. We had to explain that one, but we could and we carried on.
Some of the issues I found were issues around the way business is done in Japan. It is very different from the way business is done here, and you have an awful lot of information going back and forth all the time, flow charts, all that kind of stuff. It was a pretty steep learning curve for me, and it was quite a job convincing all the other farmers to keep all the proper paperwork and all that stuff that goes along with it.
I'm not sure. I can't blame government for this one. It's really hard to get farmers together for meetings. It's really hard to get people in to try to.... Certainly most of the farmers in P.E.I. that I'm dealing with, before we started this, had no idea of the kinds of things you have to do to take a product directly to market, particularly in Japan.
I was in Dubai a couple of years ago. I was invited over there to try to sell some potatoes. In the process, the guy found out we were selling jam in Japan, and he said that if we could sell it in Japan he was interested in buying it there too, because they use that as being such a tough and picky market as far as labelling and all that sort of stuff goes.
What I do and have done in the past, when I don't know who to contact, is to phone one of my people who work at the Department of Agriculture to get him or her to track down who I should be talking to, because it is a bit hard to track down who you need to talk with sometimes to find out about importing, what the tariff might be on something we're trying to bring in. And if there are tariffs, we have to find out what's shipping out and how to have all the proper paperwork done.
It's working. As I say, at the trade shows and so on, sometimes the really big companies have staff and knowledge that the little fellows don't have. We don't necessarily know the proper way to do it.