The Canadian Pork Council is calling for government intervention to help the pork sector cope with the impact of trade disputes between the United States and its key trading partners.
In recognition of the fallout from trade disputes between the United States and key markets for farm products such as China, Mexico and Canada the U.S. Government is providing a 12 billion dollar trade mitigation package, which includes a series of pork specific initiatives.
Gary Stordy, the Director of Government and Corporate Affairs with the Canadian Pork Council, says Canadian farmers face the same market conditions and need help from Canada’s federal and provincial governments.
On the U.S. side they have a much stronger ability to insulate themselves because of their hedging ability so they know what their price point is. That’s one business risk management tool they have. However it doesn’t appear that was sufficient and the U.S. administration recently announced several initiatives to remediate the pain or the hurt for producers on the ground.
These programs are not targeted to just one industry. It’s the number of agricultural commodities that have been hit by tariffs. Corn, soy have been two. Certainly Hogs have been included also.
Those three programs, one involves a marketing or a promotion effort to move pork outside the U.S. One is their domestic buying program where they purchase product for, whether it’s schools, military or food aid and then the third one is a direct subsidy. On the Canadian side we don’t have those tools and we’re not confident that the existing tools that producers have access to are sufficient.
~ Gary Stordy, Canadian Pork Council
Stordy says timing is import as it’s not know how long these trade disruptions will continue.
