Canadian beef sector marks five years of CETA

Sep 21, 2022

Ottawa, Ontario –, Canadian cattle producers will mark the fifth anniversary of the implementation of the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between Canada and the European Union (EU) with disappointment and resolve.

The Canadian Cattle Association (CCA) remains a leading supporter of opening access for Canadian beef exports to the European Union. Although the CETA created quotas for nearly 65,000 tonnes of duty-free access for Canadian beef, unresolved technical barriers have prevented CETA from delivering its full potential.

Back in 2017, CCA had estimated that when the CETA quotas were fully implemented, there would be potential to export $600 million of Canadian beef annually to the European Union. In 2021, exports to the EU were 1450 tonnes valued at $23.7 million. CCA projects a similar total for 2022.

“Our exports to Europe are minimal, a far cry from what we expected and certainly much less than the amount of beef Europe is sending to Canada,” commented Reg Schellenberg, CCA President.

The imbalance in the Canada-EU beef trade is striking. In 2021, Europe exported 16,295 tonnes of beef worth $100 million to Canada and for every pound of Canadian beef exported to Europe, Canada has imported eleven. In 2022, that imbalance has increased to a 17 to 1 ratio.

“Despite the disappointing results thus far, CCA remains resolved in unlocking trade potential in the EU,” said Schellenberg.

The main problem is that the EU does not recognize the Canadian food safety system as a whole. Instead, they impose their individual requirements on Canada, with the result that when our regulatory frameworks don’t completely align, Canadian processors have to re-work their operations for special Europe runs and then switch back to comply with Canadian requirements. This results in increased costs that largely make exporting beef to Europe not profitable.

CCA representatives visited Brussels last week to discuss solutions to address the obstacles. CCA has submitted scientific evidence on why the EU should recognize the efficacy of our system. We are hopeful that their review of the science will result in an approval of the way we do things. Such approval will pave the way for both Canada and the EU to enjoy beneficial growth in bilateral beef trade in the future.

Source : Cattle.Ca

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids