CUSMA review needs to be top priority for provincial and federal governments, agricultural exporters

The General Manager of Manitoba Pork suggests the renegotiation of the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement should be the number one priority for federal and provincial governments and those who export agricultural products.

The first mandatory joint review of the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement officially starts July 1st.

Cam Dahl, the General Manager of Manitoba Pork, expects the profitability we saw in the hog industry last year to continue until at least the middle this year but the CUSMA review is a concern.

I think that this is the number one file for governments, both provincial and federal in Canada. We could see the agreement terminated. We could see ourselves being put into a cycle of annual reviews where this uncertainty is moved forward year after year after year and it is having an impact on the industry.

I really do believe that agriculture in Canada, especially export oriented agriculture, we need to come together with a common voice and develop a strategy going into the CUSMA review and we don’t have that today. That’s something that needs to be corrected and it needs to be corrected quickly.

Our initial position is “do no harm”. Let’s at least at a minimum preserve the free flow of pigs and pork that we have today. Fortunately, that’s something that’s something that’s shared with our partners in the United States as well, where the agriculture industry in the U.S. across almost all commodities are looking at the agreement with Canada and Mexico and saying “don’t disturb this. It is good for consumers and it’s good for farmers.”

That’s our initial hope and, if we can improve things, like speed the rate of approval of pharmaceuticals and feed inputs and those kinds of things, that would be a bonus but the starting position is we need to preserve the market that we have today.

~ Cam Dahl, Manitoba Pork

Dahl acknowledges protectionism is not isolated to the United States and we see it in other countries. He says we should be going through a period of growth and infrastructure renewal but that’s hard to do when markets and your ability to sell into the future are at risk and uncertain.