Thank you for the opportunity to speak today.
My name is Brian Morrison and I'm the chair of the Prince Edward Island Cattle Producers association.
The TPP, for our province here... We're an exporting province, of course, we do have the only federally inspected beef plant east of, I believe, Ontario now. To make our plant profitable, to make our producers profitable, we need to utilize the whole animal, and in other parts of the world they use different parts from what we do here, so exporting is basically a win-win for our province if we're able to access markets all around the world with fewer trade barriers, for sure.
There are pros and cons to everything—we know that—but Canada by and large is an export country, so the more products that we can move to markets where they want them and appreciate the different pieces of an animal, the better. On Prince Edward Island our provincial government has targeted us as a food island exporter, so we are very much focused on niche markets, whether it be livestock, lobster, seafood, soybeans, whatever it might be. Whatever we can grow and produce here we don't have a large quantity of, so we need to find customers around the world who want a specific product, and grow forward. We're very much behind the trade initiative from an export province, for sure. There are many details and things that are far beyond myself.
We have a small soybean plant on Prince Edward Island that ships in excess of 10,000 acres' worth of product to China, so with fewer tariffs and fewer barriers for that business, it boils back down to the primary producer being able to get paid more. We have a small beef processing plant on Prince Edward Island, so we're actively looking for niche markets around the world for product, whether it be Wagyu beef that can be exported, or whether it's just different parts of the animal that other places use, and they don't in North America. It's very important to us as an export province to have trade deals and fewer tariffs in different places.
We are working quite hard as an association on the export of beef. Just today there are six animals' worth of beef in Hong Kong that came from my farm a week ago. We're working very hard to develop relationships in different places of the world that want a specific product, and when you're small scale like we are here, we can adapt quicker to smaller niche markets and hopefully return better money back to the primary producer so that they can expand their....
I should back up a little bit. We have about 400 beef producers on Prince Edward Island, and most are family farms, small businesses, a father, son, grandson kind of thing. We can adapt more quickly to smaller markets and niche markets around the world. That's where our association has mostly been focusing.
Once again, I probably got ahead of myself, but I really want to thank you folks for coming to Prince Edward Island and for giving us the chance to present in front of you today.
I'll turn it over to Rinnie for a second, and then we'll wait for questions.