The chair of Sask Pork applauding the successful conclusion of negotiations aimed at bringing Canada into the 12 nation Trans-Pacific Partnership.
An agreement was reached this past weekend among the 12 nations involved in negotiations aimed at creating a Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement and the next step will be for the deal to go to Parliament for ratification.
Saskatchewan Pork Development Board chair Florian Possberg says the deal creates a level playing field for Canada to compete with the United States, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand and others which is a good starting point and countries like Japan, that depend on food imports, have agreed to reduce barriers to access their markets.
Florian Possberg-Saskatchewan Pork Development Board:
What we've experienced in recent trade deals with specific countries is, if we have a disadvantaged trade agreement with a significant trade partner we lose out very rapidly.
South Korea is a very recent example where the United States was able to negotiate a free trade agreement with South Korea before Canada was and we saw 75 percent of our business with South Korea disappear.
This Trans-Pacific involves very major trading partners for us, like Japan, where we do roughly a billion dollars worth of business annually and quite frankly, if we would not have been successful in joining the TPP, very likely our ability to export to one of our very major markets would have been totally disadvantaged.
Possberg says this has been a difficult process for the federal government and it involved cooperation of all of the provincial governments as well.
He says it shows the dedication and commitment to being a global partner in terms of trade and there has to be a lot of appreciation on the part of the pork industry for the amount of hard work that went into making this happen.
Source: Farmscape