Friday, January 30, 2015

Canada ready to expand pork exports

Kevin Grier says Canada is in a good position to expand pork production for export markets.

It has weathered seven or eight incredibly-tough years of low prices, U.S. trade barriers and wildly fluctuating feed costs without losing its 15 to 20 per cent share of global pork exports.

Now that the tough times are behind it, the industry is in solid shape to expand, using record-high profits last year, a decline in feed costs and relative success – compared with the United States – in limiting death from Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea virus.

The United States is in a last-gasp effort to preserve its protectionist Country-of-Origin Labeling regulations and if it loses during an appeal hearing Feb. 17 and 18 at Geneva, the World Trade Organization will order it to either drop COOL or face punitive tariffs that Canada and Mexico could impose to pressure the U.S.

“I think the data gathered by independent sources around the world have shown that Canada at the production level is a very competitive production area globally,” Grier told a recent pork-industry conference at Banff, Alta.

“We rank among the least cost producers amongst all the major producers.


“We're among the least cost and so, from a production perspective, Canada is a very competitive nation,” he said.

But he also cautioned that Canadian meat packers are less efficient than their competitors in the United States.


That is “where we start to run into some problems,” he said, including lack of opportunities to match the high volumes that can be run through the largest U.S. plants.