Farmscape for October 2, 2015

The president of Sunterra Farms says participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership offers a tremendous opportunity to expand Canada's agri-food exports.
Representatives of the 12 nations involved in the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade negotiations are meeting this week in Atlanta in hopes of finalizing an agreement.
70 percent of the pork sold by Sunterra Farms goes to Japan, 10 to 15 percent to the United Sates and the company has also sold to Australia Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore.
Sunterra Farms president Ray Price says if Canada ends up outside the agreement the pork industry we will lose market share and it would devastate the markets his company has developed over the past 23 years.

Clip-Ray Price-Sunterra Farms:
In Japan there's a very complicated import regime.
They do import billions of dollars worth of pork every year but it's under a regime that is difficult to navigate and also is expensive to navigate.
Some of the other countries, I think Australia and New Zealand in particular, have been importing Canadian pork but there are some challenges there that we'd like to see improved market access to.
I think our experience as an industry in Korea is one that, when we got behind other trading partners like the U.S. and Chile, certainly Canada's market share dropped dramatically so this TPP is an outstanding opportunity for us to increase our production and market share into a very important market like Japan and continue to have good access into the United States and Mexican markets and we want to be in an agreement for those reasons as well.
If we are not inside the largest trading block in the world, it would be devastating.
Certainly within the pig side of it or the pork side, it could take a billion dollars off the sales that we would have or conversely add a billion so it's a huge factor in terms of viability of Canadian operations.

Price says the TPP offers a tremendous opportunity and he's confident Canadian agriculture can out compete the other countries.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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