Agriculture committee  I think the main thing is that we need to talk with each other and be open to being flexible about what works and makes sense. You start with an idea and listen to your partners, really listen. They may say it's like this and we would work better that way and be open to that. Tha

Agriculture committee  The short answer is we could get that information and get it back to you.

Agriculture committee  That's an excellent question. I think there's an untapped market out there for all the indigenous entrepreneurs who are growing their own unique organic products. Sometimes it's been going on for many generations, and they just don't know how to market it. They're drinking it. T

Agriculture committee  I'll give you an example. In my community, we actually have a food security program. It's funded, by the way. It's been around for awhile. They do good work and it's really small community stuff. I think more of that is really important to developing that arena. In my experience

Agriculture committee  Yes, definitely. We have different types of aboriginal financial institutes. We have aboriginal capital corporations, ACCs, that are specifically in the lending business. Community Futures is a partner. I'm sure Community Futures is in your communities. It is a bit more than lend

Agriculture committee  Rather than just dealing with each individual Community Futures, you could come to us because they're all under our umbrella. Then we could work with them to make sure that the program we're trying to create is off the ground. We'd know how to tweak it so that it actually fits as

Agriculture committee  I think there is the possibility for it. The problem is that as soon as somebody gets control of a fund, they don't want to give it up and share it, even if it's not being used. That's the challenge we face. We have a pool of money across Canada with our different AFIs, aborigi

Agriculture committee  The thing we've learned at our end is that we know our entrepreneurs better than you, with all due respect. We think that if you wanted to get better access to the aboriginal farmer or the agri-food players, you could do it through an organization like ours. We have boots on the

Agriculture committee  Thank you. I think the things that have been the key to our success have been that we are indigenous, that we interface with the indigenous entrepreneurs across the country and that we know and understand them because we come from the same community. We're not one national organ