Farmscape for October 12, 2017

Saskatchewan's Agriculture Minister will take his province's message of the value of trade to Denver next week when he attends the Tri-National accord.
The Tri-National Accord, an annual event which has brought together representatives of Canada, the United States and Mexico since 1992, is set for October 17 to 19 in Denver.
Saskatchewan Agriculture Minister Lyle Stewart says, with the renegotiation of NAFTA underway, the event is particularly timely this year.

Clip-Lyle Stewart-Agriculture Minister Saskatchewan:
Our message will be that trade with the United States and Mexico is extremely important to us in the province of Saskatchewan and I think I can speak for Canada.
From Saskatchewan's perspective the U.S. is our largest importer of our goods particularly agricultural products and Mexico is number five.
These are very important export markets to us as a province and very important to Canada.
Our message will also be that NAFTA has been good for all three countries.
Unfortunately I think a lot of people take that trade for granted and it's not a given.
I remember times when it was seriously disrupted.
Perhaps the last time was COOL and that was under NAFTA but it was the NAFTA dispute mechanism that finally broke that log jam.
President Trump has talked about things like eliminating the dispute mechanism and I think that's a hill for us to die on and ought to be.
We need that or any agreement's not really worth the paper that it's written on.
So we'll be talking about the importance of trade to all three countries and particularly the importance of continuing with something very similar to the NAFTA that we've been familiar with.

Stewart says the Tri-National Accord provides an opportunity to discuss minor trade irritants and, he stresses most of the irritants in our trade relationship have been minor.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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