By Bruce Cochrane
The chair of Manitoba Pork says ratification of the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement is critical to Canada's ability to remain competitive internationally with the United States.
The 12 nations involved in the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade negotiations struck a deal this past weekend and it's now up to Canada's Parliament to ratify the agreement.
George Matheson, the chair of Manitoba Pork, says the TPP is the biggest free trade agreement ever involving 40 percent of the world's economy.
George Matheson-Manitoba Pork:
Canada is an exporting nation of most things and in pork in particular.
We export 60 percent of our product.
Manitoba, last year by itself, exported around $700,000,000 to 7 of the participating 12 countries in this agreement.
As far as Japan is concerned, that's the largest importer of our pork products.
Canadian pork producers last year exported $1,000,000,000 worth of pork product just to Japan alone.
In total we export about $3,000,000,000 worth of product to 100 countries of the world and this has increased 4 fold over the last 20 years.
It's been growing in the past, it will continue to grow in the future and we fully realize that there are a lot of middle class people in the Asian region.
In fact there's around half a billion right now and that's expected to grow 6 times to about 3,000,000,000 middle class citizens in the next 15 years so we look upon this as a huge market now and a growing market with huge potential in the future.
To have this agreement to reduce import tariffs, to be on the same playing field that our competitor, in this case the U.S., is on is absolutely necessary.
Matheson says it will be a disaster if Canada pulls back from this deal, especially if the U.S. Congress accepts it on behalf of its producers.
Source: Farmscape