The Chair of Canada Pork International says the level of interest among buyers in China in Canadian pork continues to build.
Last month Federal Agriculture Minister Lawrence MacAulay, accompanied by representatives of Canada's agri-food sector travelled to China for a 10 day Team Canada trade mission.
Neil Ketilson, the Chair of Canada Pork International, who participated in the Shanghai portion, notes China has over a billion people.
Clip-Neil Ketilson-Canada Pork International:
I'll give you an idea.
When we were in Shanghai, Shanghai is composed of 26 million people.
That's 80 percent of the population of Canada and it's concentrated in one small area.
We went to a restaurant that the owners had 80 restaurants under their umbrella.
To give you an idea of magnitude, they import bones from the hogs as a base material for a hot pot restaurant, which they are.
They import two containers a month of these bones and that's just that one little restaurant.
Think about that in terms of the size and magnitude of what that market could be.
They're quite willing to pay for it and once we get into the higher value cuts, that'll be there as well.
China has over a billion people.
It's roughly 10 times Japan so if you think of that in those terms, we need to be there.
It can be and will be a very significant market and all the indications from the buyers that we talked tom, there's a significant increase in demand and Canada can fill some of that and I'm sure our members over there and the people that sell the product know that very well and they're making contacts right now, they're making customers and they're setting up a supply chain to make sure we can get there.
Source : farmscape