The Executive Director of the Canadian Agri-Food Trade Alliance says its just released "Principles for Sustainable and Fair Trade in the Agri-Food Sector" is providing Canada's trade negotiators an outline of the priorities of Canada's agri-food exporters and is being well received.
The Canadian Agri-Food Trade Alliance has Introduced a document which outlines eleven Principles for Sustainable and Fair Trade in the Agri-Food Sector, designed to provide the Canadian government an outline of the needs of Canadian agri-food exporters.CAFTA Executive Director Michael Harvey says the goal was to identify principles that can be referred to in any kind of discussion because there's lots of upcoming international trade discussions that touch on these issues.
Quote-Michael Harvey-Canadian Agri-Food Trade Alliance:
The World Trading Organization is looking at having a retreat in the next year to discuss trade in agri-food and we want to have something that the Canadian government can refer to to say Canada's agri-food exporters have this opinion.Other environments like bilateral discussions with the European Union where we've been seeing them make legislative decisions on things like deforestation that might have a laudable sustainability goal and end up having a lot of negative unforeseen effects like increasing costs for producers in other countries, pushing Europe's internal discussions on sustainability onto other environments that don't have the same setup as Europe, unforeseen effects that we want to avoid by pitting down some principles about what Canada should be looking for.
What we want is Canada's trade negotiators to have these principles clear and to stick as much as possible to these principles when negotiating international trading agreements or international trade documents.We've been meeting with government officials, walking through the principles and we've had really good feedback, saying that they like to get this kind of input from industry and that this gives them something to refer to so that they're exactly clear on what industry is looking for.
The Canadian Agri-Food Trade Alliance's Principles for Sustainable and Fair Trade in the Agri-Food Sector can be accessed at cafta.org.
Source : Farmscape.ca