Farmscape for October 20, 2015

The vice-president of Hylife says ratification by the Canadian Parliament of the recently completed Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement will be key to the Canadian pork industry's continued ability to remain competitive in important export markets.
An agreement was reached earlier this month among the 12 member nations involved in negotiations aimed at creating a Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement however that agreement must now pass the scrutiny of the federal Parliament for ratification and implementation.
Claude Vielfaure, the vice-president of Hylife, says it's important that Canada maintain the same terms of access as the United States and, although we don't have all of the details, it appears the Trans-Pacific Partnership has accomplished that.

Clip-Claude Vielfaure-Hylife:
It was a very important deal.
We export over 80 percent of our pork and so for us it was extremely important to be able to get trade deals done with different countries and this obviously was the biggest one in the world.
It takes 40 percent of the economy out there so we're very excited to be part of a trade deal.
It's important for Canada to be part of it.
Canada, as a whole, we're an exporting country so for us to survive as a country we have to sell and export our product so it's important to get deals with all these countries.
It's crucial that we do pass this deal and that we continue to open our borders to be able to sell products all over the world.
On the pork side in Canada, we probably sell in Canada about 70 percent of the pork we produce and so obviously with that kind of number it's very important that we are able to sell it.

Vielfaure says there's more and more free trade deals being signed and the Trans-Pacific Partnership obviously is a big one.
He says there will probably be other countries that will want to be part of it in the future so it opens a base agreement that can be used when negotiating with other countries.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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