Agriculture committee  Yes. It's not the right area.

Agriculture committee  In our area, wheat was once king, and even this year with the wheat prices up.... But then you've got to recognize that canola has hit through the roof and you've got these other crops that have increased maybe even faster. So everybody's looking for this big expansion of wheat acreage, right?

Agriculture committee  The second thing is we just found it not profitable compared to the other crops because the yields were never great. We had drought, etc. So it was just the economics of that area with the effect of pulse--

Agriculture committee  Well, you see, in my opinion a lot of the better farmers who are still farming don't even listen to some of these discussions about mixing crops depending on prices of commodities. I always find that a lot of the good farmers actually have a rotation they deal with now, and of course that's where lentils and peas, etc., fit perfectly in their rotation crop, because of less nitrogen in the crop.

Agriculture committee  Yes, that's what happened this year.

Agriculture committee  Let me give you an example. Suppose that somebody reads a report, which isn't available from Monsanto, on why genetically modified wheat may be the way to go or on releasing this wheat. If this is really true, and it might be, you have to give people in the public information also.

Agriculture committee  Well, I think you get around it, for example, with the trade the gentleman who just left is involved in. I think the trade very well knows that the product they're actually buying is biotech and is not a GMO product. When we deal with the Japanese, they know exactly what they're buying when it comes to buying wheat from Canada, and that's why they buy here.

Agriculture committee  I'm not sure. The impact.... You asked me what the impact the StarLink corn has...?

Agriculture committee  That's where this comes up; it was really brought up in this case. In the StarLink corn case, when they found StarLink in the corn supplies when the farmers sued Aventis, the issue there was trading with the Japanese, and the corn market took the big hit as soon as they discovered there was StarLink in the corn system.

Agriculture committee  Right. But at the present time, that's what you've got. So people are promoting or moving toward having products where you don't have zero tolerance, where you may move to a 2% or 3% tolerance of GMOs. But the segregation cost really became an issue there, and they're highlighted again in the StarLink case.

Agriculture committee  Here are a couple of comments. First of all—and it may be the answer to this other gentleman too—you have to remember that there are some GMOs that really you have to accept and that there's no controversy over. BT Cotton, for example, was a huge breakthrough. You don't consume cotton, so there's no controversy on some of these.

Agriculture committee  No, but I've also done work with some colleagues with respect to the oil spill in the gulf, so we actually have a methodology by which you can determine the damages from an oil spill, what we call compensating and equivalent variation measures. This was also the application on the Exxon Valdez oil spill years ago.

Agriculture committee  I am actually a farmer, and we farm on a fairly large scale in Saskatchewan. We farm out of the city of Regina. Our daughter farms north of Saskatoon and they've been very successful with canola. If there are any issues with respect to canola, on their farm, etc., they think it was a wonderful idea to grow the canola they can.

Agriculture committee  We did that.

Agriculture committee  We were involved in a project in India recently on biofuels. I tried to find out about the perception of the people in India about lentils. As you know, they're the big buyer of lentils from Saskatchewan. Every time you go to the restaurant and eat soup, etc., it has a label of contents showing lentils in it.