Mr. Chairman, this was an issue that was talked about at the fisheries committee meeting last week. The member's point is valid in terms of how the Europeans are operating with their tariff, basically making it impossible for our fishermen mainly in Newfoundland to compete against that tariff wall. The fact is the Danish and others are fishing not far off the coast of Newfoundland, just on the Flemish cap. They are able to take their product home and process it. As a result, they have a 20% cost advantage.
I believe the member is correct in that there are ways and means of trying to resolve that issue by bilateral discussions, but I do not believe for a minute that the minister or the government is just locked into the WTO negotiations at those rounds. We are consistently trying to deal with countries on a bilateral basis to try to resolve some of these issues and we are trying to resolve that one as well.
There is another point I want to bring up because the member raised it. There was an implication there that perhaps because food exports were considered small in the overall general picture of things they did not seem as important. I do not believe that to be true.
I do believe there is a problem in terms of the public's attitude toward food security. Whether it is fish or agriculture, people believe they can go into the grocery store and pick the product off the shelf. Since September 11, we should take our food security issues more seriously. We will have to ensure that the producers can survive economically. They cannot continue to produce below the cost of production as they have done for so many years.
We need an attitudinal shift in our society that puts primary producers as the generators of wealth that they are and recognize the important place they have in our society in producing the food that goes on the grocery shelves which sustains our life.