Farmscape for July 20, 2017

The Canadian Meat Council is hopeful a key technical barrier blocking the export of Canadian pork into Europe can be resolved prior to the implementation of Canada's new free trade agreement with the European Union.
September 21 has been set as the implementation date for the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement involving Canada and the European Union.
Ron Davidson, the Director of International Trade, Government and Media Relations with Canadian Meat Council, says two key technical barriers, health mark labelling and antimicrobial intervention, will delay commercially viable access to Europe for Canadian beef and pork.

Clip-Ron Davidson-Canadian Meat Council:
The first one pertains to where the health mark is placed on packages of meat that are going to Europe.
This is of concern because when we have an animal, only pieces of it will go to Europe.
Other parts of the animal go elsewhere.
If we are putting the health mark on the boxes at the production plant before they go into cold storage, this causes a problem for our companies because the product that is not going to Europe is going to have this health mark on it so we wish to be able to place the health mark on immediately before the product goes to Europe.
That one, we think should be resolvable and we are quite surprised it hasn't already been resolved.
The antimicrobial interventions is particularly of concern to the bovine sector, the beef producers and to only some pork producers.
That is because the European Union has not approved all of the antimicrobial interventions that we have in Canada and they will not permit the importation of meat products using those interventions until we have achieved European approval.

Davidson says the antimicrobial intervention issue is unlikely to be resolved by the September 21 implementation date which means beef producers won't be able to take advantage of commercially viable access to the EU for quite some time.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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