Mr. Speaker, the member has asked an interesting question. The power relationship tips because of the size that they are and the amount of money that goes into research. That is what happens. There are some pieces in the legislation that would allow someone to take intellectual property up to a certain level and use it and work on it. The problem is that when public dollars go out, then one of the competitors is gone. The next piece is when small seed producers leave and just a handful are left.
Where is the royalty? Farmers want to know. They want to know if it is when they buy a bag of seed, at the end, or both. They want to know where it is. The bill does not say anything about that. Some farmers will say that an end-point royalty is okay, because if they buy lousy seed and they have a lousy crop, they will pay a lousy price for it. The problem is that if farmers pay a decent price for a lousy bag of seed and then receive an end-point royalty, they have paid a lot for stuff that was lousy in the first place.
That is the problem. The bill would not allow folks to fight that off. In our view, it would unbalance what we thought could be a balance between those large corporations that come in with intellectual property rights and those that are smaller and do not have them. The amendments would allow them to succeed in the marketplace.