Farmscape for February 7, 2018

The Manager of Industry and Policy Analysis with the Saskatchewan Pork Development Board says, while Canada's pork producers and processors remain hopeful the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement will conclude successfully, our pork sector has viable alternatives available.
Negotiations aimed at updating the North American Free Trade Agreement will move to Mexico for round 7 later this month.
Mark Ferguson, the Manager of Industry and Policy Analysis with Sask Pork, says the processors and many hog producers in the United States don't want to see NAFTA come to an end and he remains optimistic a new deal will be agreed to.

Clip-Mark Ferguson-Saskatchewan Pork Development Board:
The U.S. is our most important trading partner for many different commodities and, in the case of pork, they're our largest export market and we export both pork and live hogs into the U.S. so we're very hopeful that any disruption to the market can be avoided and I think this is especially the case for live pigs.
With that being said, in the case of pork, we have other trade deals in place.
We've got CETA, the CPTPP that will hopefully be coming into force so we have viable alternative markets for pork if the U.S. does pull out of the deal.
On a cost basis Canada can compete with any country across the world.
I think it's a good thing we've diversified our markets and we have these deals in place.
I hope we can avoid any disruption to the market.
The U.S. is our most important market so I hope that they're able to settle things.

Ferguson says we've had several years of good prices and feed prices are competitive so there's a lot of optimism out in the country regarding the hog business.
He says we have an integrated North American market and moving away from the hurts us all in the long term so free trade is generally viewed as a good thing for all countries, that's economics 101. so we're optimistic a resolution can be found.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork