Thank you for your question.
As I was saying earlier, agriculture is a very capital-intensive sector. To produce $1 in income, you easily have to invest $7 or $8. This is not like in the service sector where you can start a company with a few dollars.
The Canadian dairy sector is marked by its great stability. I invite you to look at the document I submitted to you. In appendix 2, one of the tables shows how farm prices in Canada are behaving in comparison to those in the United States. The diagram shows the characteristics of the Canadian dairy sector and the American dairy sector. On the Canadian side, the producers’ income is very stable. On the American side, it is very unstable. For business people, instability means a lot of risk. If production prices are unstable, your son will have much more difficulty obtaining financing because his income is no longer predictable. In addition, when risk is high, interest rates are very high. So we have to consider the Canadian supply management system essentially as a way of managing risk.
As for innovation, I have to insist that, in the last 30 years, the system has been constantly evolving. There is often a tendency to think that it has remained static but, each year, the industry makes great efforts to come together. We bring together discussion groups and we also have ways to come together with our buyers on the topic of production on a Canadian scale. So there is interaction. We ourselves are investing in research, in collaboration with universities. In Quebec, the major processors are particularly involved in research. That cohesiveness is where a lot of innovation starts. From that perspective, the Canadian dairy sector compares very favourably to other dairy sectors around the world. It truly is characterized by the predictability and the stability of its income, factors that contribute to its development.
In conclusion, I would say that we need all the various forms of agriculture in the world in order to meet the needs of the population in the coming decades. They cannot all have the same model as American agriculture or New Zealand agriculture. We need agriculture such as we have in Canada, distributed over the huge territory of a big country. If we want that agriculture to survive, we need an agricultural policy like the one currently in place.