The vice-president of Hylife says Canada’s participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership will help maintain his company’s competitiveness in Japan, while creating new export opportunities in other nations.
An agreement was reached earlier this month among the 12 nations involved in negotiations aimed at creating a Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement and that agreement must now pass the scrutiny of the federal Parliament for ratification and implementation.
Claude Vielfaure, the vice-president of Hylife, says Canada exports over 80 percent of the pork it producers and, because this trade agreement is the biggest in the world, accounting for 40 percent of the global economy, its important for Canada to be part of it.
We already were exporting a lot of pork to Japan. That was one of our biggest markets on fresh chilled pork so that was a very very important market that stays open for us and, because of the TPP, it was important to be part of the deal but also to have a level playing field. So what ever was negotiated, that Canada was on the same terms as the U.S. and any other country to be able to sell pork.
We don’t have all the details of the deal but I think that has been accomplished and so, for us, that is exciting and hopefully be able to continue to sell to Japan and that opens other markets like Vietnam and Malaysia. Vietnam has high tariffs and that will go away over time so it opens up some different countries for us to be able to sell more pork so, for us, it was extremely important to be able to get trade deals done with different countries.
When you do these trade deals there’s more and more being signed. This obviously is a big one. There will probably be other countries that will want to be part of it in the future and it opens up a base agreement that you can use for other negotiations with different countries so I think that’s all very positive.
Vielfaure says it’s important for Canada be part of the TPP and Hylife is looking forward to growing under this agreement.
