Farmscape for August 2, 2023
The Executive Director of the Canadian Pork Council suggests consumers and government need to understand the importance of having affordable pork products on our health.
The Canadian Pork Council is calling on the Senate to make moving forward Bill C-234, a private members bill which provides for exemptions for farmers to Canada's carbon tax, a top priority when it reconvenes in the fall.
Canadian Pork Council Executive Director Stephen Heckbert says where the carbon tax has been most harmful is that, unlike the GST, every step of the food production process is taxed.
Quote-Stephen Heckbert-Canadian Pork Council:
Adding a carbon tax onto farm inputs means that the price of food goes up.
You know, over the last couple of years with COVID consumers saw an increase in prices at the retail level.
Unfortunately, farmers, certainly in the pork sector, did not see as big an increase in what we received in payments for the products.
So, what's at stake for us is we need to do anything that we can do to try to keep the industry competitive and make sure we can continue to feed the world from Canada.
We're still talking about an industry that's 70 percent export focussed.
If you increase our cost and make us less competitive globally then it's difficult for us to be competitive globally, which impacts how many processing jobs there are, how many producers there are and all of those things.
So, the impact of any individual decision can have a ripple effect across the economy.
We really want to make sure that consumers and government understand the benefits of having affordable pork products and affordable protein products and that the health benefits of eating protein and eating red meat continue and at the same time that we have the benefits of the economic impact of this industry as well.
Heckbert says anything government can do to reduce input costs for farmers should be done.
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Bruce Cochrane.
*Farmscape is produced on behalf of North America’s pork producers