Agriculture committee  Could I just explain a couple of aspects of that?

Agriculture committee  The first aspect is that we looked at the Gibson Capital company. It is true that Mr. Gibson did work for the Wheat Board back in the early nineties. He has been a consultant now for a long period of time and has extremely good credentials associated with risk management across a number of industries.

Agriculture committee  That's the theory. I think I said to the committee previously that there's no question that the Canadian Wheat Board needs to be able to demonstrate that value. We are in the process of looking at how we make sure we have transparency associated with our operations and the right benchmarks to judge us by, and therefore put the information out, good or bad.

Agriculture committee  A voluntary Wheat Board is a deregulated market, so you have to look at what that model might look like. The Wheat Board as we know it today would certainly not easily exist in that deregulated environment. You can look at the model now being developed in Australia after the deregulation that occurred there in July of last year.

Agriculture committee  You're right that I came to the Wheat Board just over 12 months ago, and most of these issues were already evident. The situation, I think, has been fairly well explained as to what happened in a very extraordinary market circumstance in 2007-08. The Wheat Board has moved to address the issues that were evident then.

Agriculture committee  I'll just talk about what the Wheat Board does in the international marketplace and let Mr. Hill talk about the transport issue. The Wheat Board is selling a large quantity of grain each year, in the order of 18 million to 21 million tonnes of grain each year. As I said, a small portion of that actually goes to the U.S. market, about 5%.

Agriculture committee  Thank you, and good morning. My remarks have been given to the committee; however, I will make a few additional comments. A significant area of the CWB's competitiveness for farmers is the marketing system we operate. With over 80% of the wheat exported overseas, to over 70 countries, not to domestic or U.S.A. customers--the U.S.A. actually accounts for about 5% of the total sales book--the CWB provides the farmers with what is regarded as the best of both worlds.

Agriculture committee  I've got to say, being relatively new to this, I'm not sure of the number of years.

Agriculture committee  Yes, I can get that information for you, sure.

Agriculture committee  I have information, Chairman, on the time we've been working on this. We started working on this in 1999.

Agriculture committee  With the two methodologies we're working on, there's been something in the order of just over $3 million invested over a number of years.

Agriculture committee  The technology we're expecting to use in the driveway is not DNA. It's wavelength technology. That is hoped to be a much simpler methodology. I have to say, I'm not really competent to go into the technical aspects of that at this point. I can certainly go into that afterwards and get someone to provide some information if you want.

Agriculture committee  We've been participating in the working groups. Given the protocols we have in place, we're relatively comfortable that the system will work. We're comforted by the view that we don't have any new varieties coming on that will cause any issue in the course of the next couple of years.

Agriculture committee  Our level of optimism is high. However, as I've said, there is no guarantee we will have it available at that stage in the form in which we want it. At this stage, what I'm hearing in terms of the research is that it does look very promising. We would expect to have it available.

Agriculture committee  There are some positive results coming forward, but, as Mr. Hermanson said, it is still not at a stage where this can be used as a low-cost driveway test in all cases. That's what we're working towards at present.