Agriculture committee  A number of things could impact our ability to access that market. One them would be the transportation to get it there. That can happen. Not all the time, but it can be an impediment. The cost of transportation, to be competitive...but those are all determined by the marketplace.

Agriculture committee  Certainly, certification of organic barley would be a benefit and a marketing tool you could use into Europe. I'm not sure, and I can't speak to this, but the amount of organic barley grown in my part of the world would be very small, and it would be grown for what I call an IP market —somebody looking for organic barley of a certain variety, that meets certain specs.

Agriculture committee  Certainly, yes, we'd like to see more breeding research done in barley, but I don't think we're in the same difficulty that I consider wheat to be in, and I grow wheat myself too. According to the person we have representing barley at our Barley Council of Canada boardroom, yes, we could make some changes and improvements in varietal registration and breeding of barley, but he said we're certainly not a broken system, if you want to put it that way.

Agriculture committee  Predominantly malt, yes.

Agriculture committee  Up to.

Agriculture committee  Potentially, yes. When we say we're going to ship malt barley to Europe, there are two ways it could go. It could go as raw barley, which is just clean it, put it in a railcar or whatever, and get it into export position. It could also go as a manufactured malt product. What we have to look at here is this: what are the tariffs on our malt companies when they try to ship malt in that direction?

Agriculture committee  See this smile on my face?

Agriculture committee  I'll give you my own personal experience. We live in a drier part of the world in southern Alberta, and it's the first time on my farm I've grown over 100-bushel-an-acre barley. It all went for malt. Just to give you an idea, it's $6 a bushel; that's what it's locked in at. I've done this for a number of years now.

Agriculture committee  I know there are a lot of smiling farmers.

Agriculture committee  Do you want to answer that?

Agriculture committee  Yes.

Agriculture committee  I would say the home for most of the barley grown in western Canada would be in the feeding industry.

Agriculture committee  I would say it's grown across both provinces, because it is a short season growing crop, so it fits very well into the more northerly regions as well as the southern regions of the provinces.

Agriculture committee  Yes.

Agriculture committee  So UPOV 91 reinforces the ability of farmers to save their seed. I have to admit it, I'm a farmer and we're our own worst enemies. We don't want to pay royalties on anything to develop new varieties. Where UPOV 91 is going to be a benefit to farmers in Canada is that it will encourage more investment, especially by private companies, to come in and start working on breeding new varieties for Canadian farmers.