The General Manager of Manitoba Pork is calling on Canada’s agricultural leadership to take the lead in formulating strategies to protect the Canadian economy.
Manitoba Pork General Manager Cam Dahl says war has triggered supply chain disruptions and is pushing up input costs while the review of the Canada U.S. Mexico Agreement, the threat of U.S. tariffs, Chinese tariffs on pork and Europe’s non-tariff trade barriers threaten the Canadian economy.
We’re seeing greater uncertainty in what the world is going to look like six months from now in terms of trade and that’s where it comes to the importance of being able to insulate not just agriculture, not just the pork sector but the Canadian economy from those impacts. That means having more value-added processing here at home. That means looking to diversify our export markets and agriculture can help drive some of that change and really be a greater driver of the Canadian economy.
First and foremost, agriculture leaders, whether that’s the associations or farm groups or our processing and input companies, our technology companies, agriculture in general needs to take the lead. We need to go to our governments and say this is what we’re going to do. This is how we’re going to accomplish our goals of trade diversification, this is how we can accomplish our goals of increasing rural employment, this is how we’re going to accomplish our goals of increased value added processing and present governments with common solutions that cross the industry rather than having a set of solutions for the pork sector and a set of solutions for the canola sector and a set of solutions for the cattle sector. We need to have a set of solutions for agriculture in general and that requires significant leadership on behalf of the industry.
~ Cam Dahl, Manitoba Pork
Dahl says the instability in geopolitics and world trade is a significant threat but it’s also a significant opportunity for agriculture to collectively lead the way in providing solutions to the Canadian economy.
