An Executive Member of Manitoba Pork’s Board of Directors says the Japanese market offers tremendous untapped opportunity for Canadian pork producers.
In early March a delegation representing the Canadian pork sector travelled to Japan to meet with customers who purchase Canadian pork.
Scott Peters, a Steinbach area pork producer and Executive Director of Manitoba Pork, notes Japan’s sow base is similar to that of Canada but, because they have to import all of their feed grain, their cost of production is quite high so they are looking outward to bring pork to their consumers.
The programs that Canada has, starting with the Verified Canadian Pork or VCP logo, was meant initially as a domestic program for Canada but, because we have that program, the Japanese jumped on it and were very accepting of it and said if you guys think this is the best pork then we want a piece of that action. If there’s a key lesson at all it’s let’s get more into that market. There’s lots of opportunities. With the TPP signing in the same week it was really good timing for us as producers to go there and see the market that we’re a part of. It’s important to keep the pedal to the metal.
On the pork side it struck me with a sense of pride that, when we walked into the cold storage that we toured, out of hundreds of thousands of boxes of meat we came across Olymel boxes and Maple Leaf boxes and HyLife boxes and the producers from across Canada stood by the boxes where they ship their meat to and we all stood there with a sense of pride. This is our meat. We made this and it’s all the way here in Japan and we’re all the way from Canada. It’s a neat story to be part of that.
~ Scott Peters, Manitoba Pork
Peters says, in terms of trade with Japan, we’ve only scraped the surface of that market potential.
