The General Manager of Manitoba Pork says there appears to be a recognition within the Trump administration of the importance of trade for agriculture.
World Pork Expo is underway this week in Des Moines.
Manitoba Pork General Manager Andrew Dickson, on hand to represent Manitoba’s pork producers and meet with U.S. producers to discuss issues of mutual concern, observes the Trump administration had been talking about renegotiating NAFTA but the wording we’re hearing now is more about tweaking NAFTA, especially when it comes to agriculture.
The message has been made loud and clear by American farm organizations that NAFTA has really worked for American agriculture and let’s not rock the boat.
The big thing is uncertainty. Uncertainty in agriculture is not a good thing. We’ve got enough problems with the weather and diseases and so on. We don’t need uncertainty about markets. We’ve got to be careful on the rhetoric shall we say that goes with NAFTA.
I don’t think anybody disagrees, there’s maybe some stuff that needs to be fixed, some regulatory stuff that needs to be cleaned up. We need to clarify some things on labelling on packaging and that sort of thing, like making sure they’re in harmony between the different countries and so on, certification of drugs.
Is there some way we could harmonize the certification of new drugs in North America and so on? That’s the type of stuff we should be talking about which is very in the weeds detailed stuff.
When you got two big mature economies like Canada and the United States, long history, over 200 to 300 years of trading to and fro, it’s not as though we need some cataclysmic event that has to be dealt with. These are mature relationships. It’s about tweaking little things here and there and making the marriage work.
~ Andrew Dickson, Manitoba Pork
Dickson says, when it comes to pork, everyone’s pointed out that the current trade relationships under NAFTA has been good for Canada and it’s been good for the United States.
