Farmscape for March 12, 2009   (Episode 3129)

Manitoba's vegetable marketing cooperative reports, while the adjustment to new U.S. Mandatory Country of Origin Labelling has been virtually seamless, the change has resulted in some inconvenience for some U.S. buyers.

Mandatory U.S. Country of Origin Labelling regulations came into effect September 30, 2008, the final version of the law takes effect March 16 and full enforcement is expected to begin next month.

In an average year, when growers produce an average to above average crop the U.S. accounts for about 30 percent of sales.

Peak of the Market president and CEO Larry McIntosh reports, for the most part, the adjustment has been relatively painless.

Clip-Larry McIntosh-Peak of the Market
For fresh vegetables, and mostly it's potatoes and carrots that we're shipping down there it doesn't have a large effect from our point of view.

In Canada we're not required to put Product of Canada on our packaging or our boxes but we always have because we're very proud that we've grown our product in Canada so we've always said Product of Canada all over our product.

As it turns out, with the new regulations in the United States, that's required but all of our packaging is already ready to go.

Where the complication comes in is we ship a lot of potatoes to the United States that are re-packaged into a local brand whether it be in California or Texas.

It certainly makes it more complicated for them to buy product out of Manitoba because they have to have two sets of bags or two sets of boxes when they put them in there but we've been working with them ever since the COOL legislations were first talked about years ago and asking them to get bags ready and asking them to get Product of Canada on their bags.

For the most part it's been fairly seamless.

Our business to the United States has continued as it has before and most of our suppliers have simply got two bag inventories now and we've helped them where ever we can with abiding by the regulations because there's a lot of confusion in the United States as well.

McIntosh says Manitoba growers offer a consistently higher quality product and there's a real demand for Canadian vegetables in the United States.

He says hopefully the rules can be sorted out and trade can continue both to and from the U.S. because the two markets are very reliant on each other.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork Council