Farmscape for December 21, 2018

An Agri-Food Economic Systems report says trade disruptions in 2018 have created opportunity and risk for Canadian agriculture.
An Agri-Food Economic Systems Agri-Food Policy Note looks at retaliatory duties levied by China on U.S. soybeans, by China and Mexico on U.S. pork and African Swine Fever in China.
Research Lead Dr. Al Mussell notes Canada is a large exporter of canola and canola products, soybeans, pork and beef.

Clip-Dr. Al Mussell-Agri-Food Economic Systems:
You've got a market that the U.S. has interrupted access to due to the retaliatory duties at the same time that China has African Swine Fever.
We're waiting to see specifically how that develops but, there could be a massive decline in Chinese pork production and even relatively minor declines in Chinese pork production, because China is so big, end up impacting particularly the pork complex but also beef and other meats globally.
On the opportunity side this looks potentially remarkable for Canada because we may have this huge opening coming in the meat protein complex.
There are risks associated with this.
One of the things we make note of in the policy note and many of us remember, in 1997 when Taiwan got Foot and Mouth Disease, Taiwan at the time was an anchor supplier of pork to Japan.
In response to that hog prices were going up and throughout North America we expanded only to result in 1998 in a situation in which literally in North America there wasn't enough pork processing capacity and we got ourselves into an absolute crisis situation in 1998.
In my understanding of it I think this is a bit of a perilous situation.
We're faced with potential remarkable game changing opportunity but also imminent risk.

The full Agri-Food Economic Systems report can be accessed at agrifoodecon.ca.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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