Farmscape for February 8, 2018

The Director of Risk Management with hams Marketing Services says the latest developments in terms of trade appear positive for the Canadian pork sector.
While negotiations aimed at revamping the North American Free Trade Agreement continue, Canada, Mexico and nine other nations have agreed to a new multilateral trade agreement.
Tyler Fulton, the Director of Risk Management with hams Marketing Services, says while the future of NAFTA is still unclear, the new CPTPP is a positive development for Canada.

Clip-Tyler Fulton-hams Marketing Services:
On the NAFTA front we haven't seen a great deal of influence on the market.
I would say that the market is still very hesitant to factor in normal trade relationships between Canada, the United States and Mexico, in particular for the last quarter of 2018.
It's possible that in the event that President Trump were to trigger an exit from NAFTA it could impact prices quite significantly in the fourth quarter but generally there's been a little more optimism that progress has been made and so that's kind of been put on the back burner until the next round of talks coming in a few weeks.
On the TPP side, absolutely a positive development for Canadian hog producers.
What it does is it secures a level playing field of fair access to markets like Japan where there were countries that were going to be benefitting from preferred access.
The European Union and Canada are likely going to be on a similar schedule of tariff rate reductions, assuming both deals can be completed.
But, to be clear, this is an advantage over the United States where they won't have the same reduction in tariffs.

Fulton says, all in all, the outlook for Canadian pork exports, to Japan in particular is positive.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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