Two things happened.
If we go back 15 or 20 years, the Canadian pea industry took off as a feed ingredient source to Europe. That was in response to high domestic price supports for cereal grains in Europe, which made the price of animal feed high. That, then, allowed us to come in to address not only the high support prices being paid for cereal but the ongoing protein deficit in the European feed market.
If we go back probably 25 years, we started an industry in Canada in response to U.S. farm bill price support that barely drove down the price of cereal grain production in Canada, and farmers were looking for some alternatives. I think our industry's origins were really part of a production distortion, which we have addressed in large part over the years through bilateral and multilateral agreements and a general trend to higher commodity prices.
But in the process we became a technology leader in our production processes, in our varietal development. We can get into a very detailed explanation, such as yields of pulses relative to yields of cereal wheat, cereal grains in Canada versus other producing regions, but the bottom line is that we've become very competitive. We are the world's biggest producer and exporter of peas and lentils, and we're among the top five bean and chickpea producers. So we are a major force, accounting for one third of global trade originating out of Canada.
We've become big, and now we just want to make sure that we remain stable and competitive. As an association, we've shifted our focus to look at what we can do to add additional value to the crops we're already growing and to ensure that we remain competitive.