Farmscape for February 6, 2017
The Chair of the Saskatchewan Pork Development Board says the U.S. rejection of the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement could potentially create new export opportunities for the Canadian pork industry.
In the early days of the Donald Trump Presidency a clear indication of the new U.S. position on international trade has emerged.
Florian Possberg, the Chair of the Saskatchewan Pork Development Board, says the two huge developments are that President Trump has stated the United States is going to back away from the TPP which involves a big part of southeastern Asia, North America and a number of the big traders in South America and Mr. Trump has indicated that he wants want to review the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Clip-Florian Possberg-Saskatchewan Pork Development Board:
Because a number of the countries that had agreed to the Trans-Pacific agreement really do trade a lot of pork, in some cases importers and some cases exporters, if the Americans step back a bit from that, there really is a potential for Canada to fill the void.
So that could be very positive for us.
You just don't know.
At this point we know that the American pork producers certainly don't want anything to hinder the trade because about 20 percent of the pork produced in the United States really depends on export markets and we're even more dependant here in Canada.
Probably 60 to 70 percent of our pork needs to enter foreign markets for our industry to sustain the level of production that we have.
So it's going to be very interesting times, perhaps some opportunities, perhaps some challenges.
Possberg acknowledges the renegotiation of NAFTA could also have significant implications for Canada
However, he notes, the Canadian dollar being 75 percent of the value of the American dollar is very helpful to our industry plus we've got slaughter capacity and a few other things going for us here.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.
*Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork
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