Agriculture committee  I'm going to say that it's a bit out of my wheelhouse to deal with in detail, but I think you bring up a good point having to do with working conditions. I believe it's the Bureau of Labour Statistics in the U.S. that has done studies in which it's found, in the truckload segment of the trucking industry, enormously high turnover rates and poor working conditions.

Agriculture committee  Maybe I'll speak to the current situation that has to do with Ukraine, and the worries about a global food crisis. One of the things we have to realize is that with Russia now having lost its most favoured nation status with many countries, access to fertilizer, specifically nitrogen fertilizer and potash, is now a strategic matter.

Agriculture committee  Regionally, it could be an issue, but it depends on the context. It could be, yes.

Agriculture committee  The context is very important here. We have to remember back to the lessons that Canada learned following the BSE instance in the early 2000s. We publicly funded the erection of meat-packing plants, beef plants specifically. One of them is back in business now, but in the years following recovery from the BSE incident, every single one of them for a period of time—I believe there were seven of them—went bankrupt.

Agriculture committee  I'll talk about meat plants again. There are all kinds of processing plants, but when you get into the meat plants, it's a hyper-competitive situation. They operate on very thin margins. It's very difficult through public policy to give an advantage to some of the plants and not the other plants.

Agriculture committee  That's a bit of a complex question. The worry we have is that farms get larger for a reason, and it has to do with efficiencies and a whole range of things. However, there are things that get left behind as a consequence of that, particularly the aspect of agriculture that ties the enterprise to a household, as it always has been.

Agriculture committee  I'm not sure there's a simple answer to that. There are some small farms that are unsuccessful because they're not of a threshold size to be able to make use of reasonable amounts of capacity or provide a reasonable income. There's a whole range of things in here. I don't think I'd want to speculate on that specific point.

Agriculture committee  They certainly could. Whether you're talking about processing plants or farms, to some extent, there are advantages with small, because small can be nimble. The difficulty is trying to get efficiencies in the system at a small scale, where you tend to have economies of size.

Agriculture committee  It probably depends a bit, but in general I would expect so.

Agriculture committee  Thanks very much. Coming into this year, we were already in a position of having very low stocks of cereal grains. Many of those stocks are held in places where they're not really available to offset shortages in other places. For example, China is currently sitting on an estimated 70% of the corn stock globally.

Agriculture committee  Another aspect of this impact is that we have input, particularly fertilizer, and particularly nitrogen fertilizer that is of Black Sea origin—Russian urea, specifically. The latest data I've seen is in excess of 500,000 tonnes imported into eastern—

Agriculture committee  Is this better?

Agriculture committee  I think our agri-food supply chains for the most part have performed very well. I think there have been a number of cases in which perhaps we've been lucky or things could have been far worse. You used the term “resilience”, which I didn't use, but I think it is a good term. That goes back to a previous question—

Agriculture committee  Is this working any better? I was having problems with this thing earlier. I was hoping we had it corrected.

Agriculture committee  I think the question was about resilience. We are discovering that many of our supply chains are built around the just-in-time inventory types of concepts to be lean and mean. When you're confronted by more than just the 2% to 5% deviations, by things like floods, and people en masse can't show up at work—