Agriculture committee  I think it's too early to tell in many respects. We've had a unique situation where we have relatively small grade spreads. An awful lot of the crop hasn't been marketed yet, and we're in a situation where we have buoyant prices, the result of droughts in the U.S., Russia, and el

Agriculture committee  The prices are not determined entirely by single desk or no single desk, or voluntary or otherwise. We have droughts that have created relatively buoyant prices. For the moment, farmers are getting high prices, but you can't attribute that to marketing freedom or a voluntary boar

Agriculture committee  Absolutely. What I nuanced was that you couldn't necessarily make a direct link to increased profitability to farms because of value-adding because we're selling at world market prices in general.

Agriculture committee  I think the Canadian Grain Commission with the grain research laboratory, etc. is a very low-cost institution. It has an annual budget of about $80 million. Up until this year, about $25 million was contributed by the federal government. The function of the grain research laborat

Agriculture committee  Absolutely. We've seen at all sorts of the institutions, particularly in plant breeding, cutbacks taking place. Breeders are leaving institutions for other pastures, and we put ourselves at peril. When we talk about innovation, it's innovation to what end? We feel that publicly f

Agriculture committee  The quality aspect parameters are established by the Canadian Grain Commission. The question is if you don't have an auditing process to ensure those parameters are indeed respected, which inward and outward inspection does, then you can very quickly run into quality issues. Ev

Agriculture committee  A little bit from time to time may come from other NGOs that will assist us in a particular research project or something in that regard. It's very—

Agriculture committee  Some of that would come from organizations like Inter Pares. It would amount to maybe $10,000 in the entire annual budget of the organization.

Agriculture committee  One of the myths about value-added processing is the assumption that it automatically benefits farmers, and especially in the grains and oilseeds industry, until value-added domestically would consume more than our entire crop, essentially, the price of those crops is determined

Agriculture committee  Okay.

Agriculture committee  If they're direct participants in the value-added system, otherwise, our prices are generally determined by—

Agriculture committee  Well, certainly, in certain respects, but not as much as is generally believed.

Agriculture committee  That's one input that farmers are fundamentally able to supply themselves. From time to time, they'll buy new varieties and multiply them on the farm. Unfortunately, it's also massively profitable on the input supply side, if you can generate control and force farmers into buying

Agriculture committee  The difference on the ground would be that farmers could very well lose a big chunk of their ability to save and reuse seed, which would drastically increase costs. The deans of agriculture at 10 universities suggested that 10% of farmers' gross income should be spent on seed an

Agriculture committee  Okay, I'll just wrap up by saying that all of these policies we're seeing are really turning back the clock without looking at the entire public good, the economic cost-benefit analysis taking place. We see it where we're paying excess contributions in the railway freight rates o