Any response or comments? Thank you very much for your presentation. Beth Nelson with the Minnesota Canola Council followed by Barry Coleman of the North Dakota Canola Association and Jodi Slocum should be next. Welcome.

MS. NELSON:

Thank you, Robin. I’m Beth Nelson, President of the Minnesota Canola Council and also Chairman of the U.S. Canola Association Pesticide Technical Working Group. And my comments first will focus on a project that we started about a year ago on crop protection for the North American Canola Industry. The Minnesota legislature appropriated $100,000 to the University of Minnesota to be used for canola pesticide registration and harmonization. Since this is not just a single state issue or, in fact, a federal issue, it’s an international issue, we worked very closely on developing a strategy that involved the Minnesota group, the North Dakota group, the U.S. Canola Association as well as the Canadians. Our mission of that strategic plan? The North American Canola Industry is dedicated to ensuring that North America is the leading world supplier of canola and canola products by identifying and registering crop protection tools using a sustainable systems approach and recognizing binational, economic, environmental and social factors. This goal will be advanced through improved and sustained cooperation of the Canadian and U.S. canola industries, our respective regulatory agencies and the international registrants. Currently, Canada has more than 40 products registered for use on canola and the U.S. has less than ten. However, infrastructure is completely reliant on cross-border transactions from seed to crushing and all the way through end products. So unlike wheat, barley and some of the others it is essential that that border stay open for our industry to survive in the U.S. This harmonization will provide the North American canola growers equal access to products and markets and will avoid potential cross border trade irritants. We are working with PMRA and EPA and they must continue to work together and have the main objective of having common MRLs and tolerances in both countries. This project was used as a model at a recent NAFTA technical working group meeting in San Antonio, Texas, and in order to harmonize and advance common MRLs tolerances for existing crop protection tools that are available in Canada or the U.S. but not available in both countries and joint registration for any new crop protection tools, it’s imperative that we foster relationships with both the registrants and the regulators. We’re currently prioritizing our list of crop protection product needs. We’re identifying registrants’ interests and ability to harmonize existing products. We’re promoting the registration of new uses on these existing products, promoting joint registration and work share of any new products and then promoting the common MRLs and tolerances overall to avoid trade irritant issues. We feel this is a non-tariff trade barrier issue. And that’s all the comments I’ll have on that strategy. If people have questions, I can address that more. More directly to the WTO concerns. The canola producers support a level playing field for trade of products. That’s the highest priority in the next WTO negotiations, elimination of tariffs and non-tariff barriers to imports, eliminate export subsidies and other government programs and activities which artificially distort the competitiveness of these products. We are also concerned about biotechnology and support negotiation of science based rules governing world trade and agriculture commodities and products containing genetic material. We don’t feel genetically modified crops should have processing labels or segregation requirements. And we would like the WTO to be established as the official recourse and arbiter for disputes involving trade of biotech crops and products.

That’s it.