Finance committee  No, we wouldn't be able to do it. So it's no good for an entrepreneur to look at it, and say, hey, I'm going to grow lamb in this province, or I'm going to grow pork in this province. We have two pork producers left in the province, because we do not have the basic infrastructure to do it; we do not have the financial wherewithal to build that infrastructure.

Finance committee  It's the same thing with vegetables. We produce 10% of the consumption of vegetables in this province. We just can't get fair market return and we have no structure to get fair market return. The supply-managed commodities, of course, exclude vegetables, so again we have to import.

Finance committee  Yes, that's correct. We have no basic infrastructure for food inspection facilities, for example, which is a federal arrangement through CFIA, that would allow us to move outside of the boundaries of the province and get into other provinces and into other countries. We don't have that capacity because of negative infrastructure.

Finance committee  I'm not sure that at this stage we need to talk about being competitive. I think we need to talk about sustainability. If we have a province where we're feeding over $100 million worth of red meat product to our consumers, and we have to import that, then I think that speaks to what we're doing in rural Newfoundland and Labrador.

Finance committee  Well, we import. Even our federal institutions, our provincial institutions...if we want anything to do with red meat, whether it's pork or anything in the red meat sector, it's imported. So it's brought in from other parts of Canada, or these days, it's mostly brought in from Argentina, Brazil, and places like that.

Finance committee  Well,in the red meat sector, especially lamb is something that we can grow here. We had 100,000 breeding ewes at the turn of the century. Today, we have 6,000, because we can't export them, we can't get them into the supermarkets. That's just one small example. As for our dairy industry, we have some of the largest dairy production facilities east of Montreal in this province.

Finance committee  Good morning. Thank you, Mr. Chair, honourable members, staff, and colleagues. My name is Mervin Wiseman. I'm the president of the Newfoundland and Labrador Federation of Agriculture, and I'm also co-chair of the newly formed Canadian agriculture sector council, which is a council that was formed to address some of the human resources issues we have facing us in the Canadian agriculture industry.