Thank you very much for your testimony and for appearing before committee today.
Mr. MacKay, you mentioned that the elimination of tariffs and the creation of better conditions for Canadian investment in Honduras were the motivating factors behind the negotiation of the Canada-Honduras FTA. But going over internal DFAIT reports, notably the report that was made public in October 2013, I was interested to read that in fact the bulk of top import and export items currently traded between Canada and Honduras are subject to very low tariffs, less than 5%. Moreover, statistics on the level of Canadian direct investment in Honduras are not actually publicly available.
We know that Honduras is Canada's 104th export market in terms of the value of exports, and internal DFAIT reports confirm that the benefits that Canada stands to gain from this FTA are in fact marginal. As a parliamentarian, I have quite a lot of trouble understanding the urgency and the need to negotiate a free trade agreement with a country like Honduras, especially considering the rampant human rights abuses that country faces.
But I'd like to touch on the question of the agricultural industry in Honduras. Bananas are the second-highest import into Canada from Honduras. But according to Festagro, which is a federation of agro-industrial unions, since 2009 there have been 31 trade unionists and 52 rural workers murdered. We still have reports of high-profile trade unionists, such as José Maria Martinez from Festagro continuing to receive death threats.
How aware is DFAIT of these human rights abuses, and how much information does DFAIT actually have on these human rights abuses and the threats these trade unionists face?