The Canadian Pork Council says the strong Canadian dollar continues to disadvantage the Canadian pork industry in international markets.
The market outlook for Canadian pork producers has brightened considerably over the past couple of months but the Canadian dollar hovering around par with its U.S. counterpart gives the U.S. a competitive advantage.
Canadian Pork Council president Jurgen Preugschas says the strong Canadian dollar is problematic for anyone exporting out of this country.
Certainly for us it’s a huge difficulty, how to get our costs in line so that we’re able to sell our pork around the world competitively.
That means that our wage structure in Canada has to also come in line with the U.S. wage structure now where we’re probably at a 50 percent disadvantage.
I’m talking not only our farmers but certainly even more important the packing and processing industry so that’s key and some of the other input costs that haven’t equalized to that new level of the U.S. Canadian dollar.
I think those are critical things and continually market access around the world.
That is important for us, we need to focus on that, we have to do that.
Thirdly is our domestic consumption, that our consumers insist on buying Canadian pork rather than imported pork.
That certainly is a key for our industry as well.
Preugschas says, because of the strong Canadian dollar, U.S. producers will turn a profit more quickly than Canadian producers and it’ll make the American industry much stronger financially.
Source: Farmscape.Ca
