Agriculture committee  We cannot do it on hogs or pork. We have the right to use export subsidies to some extent on dairy products, but that's all. Beyond that, we also have the challenge, which France doesn't have to the same extent, that our pork sector as well as our beef sector rely heavily on ex

Agriculture committee  I think that's one of the problems with the WTO negotiations: nothing happens quickly. If we manage to reach an agreement in the spring on the modalities, it would take us the rest of 2008 to finish the whole agreement. Then it wouldn't begin to come into effect until at the earl

Agriculture committee  To start, with respect to the penalties that France could face for the assistance being provided to the hog sector, the primary means of assistance that I've been seeing is use of export subsidies. They do have the legal right to do that under the WTO. With the agreement, that ri

Agriculture committee  Most of the major developed countries have their own sensitivities, clearly, just as we do. The U.S. has sensitivities in sugar and in dairy, and despite much of the rhetoric, it's been playing defence as much as offence on many issues. The European Union has sensitivities on da

Agriculture committee  Well, it certainly changed the dynamics from previous negotiations. In the last negotiation, the U.S. and Europe were pretty close, and we weren't far off from a deal. Now we have significant players like China and India and Brazil that are carrying a lot of weight to the table b

Agriculture committee  I sure hope so. I've been at this for a long time, but I think the conditions now are more positive than they've been so far in this negotiation, by a fair margin. We really don't have that many more issues at a negotiator's level to resolve. We've now reached the point where the

Agriculture committee  Well, unfortunately, that's also one of our bigger challenges, because the European Union is getting out of all of its quotas, the supply-management-type schemes, and moving towards a different system, based mainly on green-box types of support and direct payments to farmers. Cou

Agriculture committee  Well, I think there are several levels of difficulty. It's an incredibly complex negotiation. First of all, we're going to have difficulties in the agriculture negotiation, particularly over how much the U.S. is prepared to cut its trade distorting domestic subsidies. That's go

Agriculture committee  Absolutely. Our beef and pork exporters can compete around the world. They have some of the most attractive products to other countries of any of our trading partners, and I think one of the bigger challenges they will have is maintaining the capacity to access some of these mark

Agriculture committee  I would have a rough idea of what they are, but I wouldn't want to hazard a guess. I don't have it off the top of my head.

Agriculture committee  Unfortunately, most of our trading partners consider a system with higher prices than what would otherwise prevail in the market as being among the most trade-distorting practices, because that system distorts what the markets would otherwise do. In fact, we suffer somewhat with

Agriculture committee  You've certainly hit on our key export interests. Those are the biggest ones and where we're putting most of our effort. I think we will see a substantial result. It's hard to put a number on it exactly, because we're negotiating opportunities, and whether we can take advantage o

Agriculture committee  To start with, I think we should look back to the conclusion of the last negotiation, because I think there has been a misconception that while the U.S. and Europe were quite creative in putting together their obligations, no one was more creative than we were. We didn't follow t

Agriculture committee  I'm not sure which seven commodities you're referring to.

Agriculture committee  Yes, indeed. In fact that's been one of our key priorities. I've spent a lot of time with my European counterpart discussing that very issue, and we've been talking about what specific result we could achieve on pork going into the European Union. We will get a much better result