With the Americans signing more Free Trade agreements all the time, Canada needs to do the same.
A coalition of nine Canadian agricultural commodity groups and companies is encouraging the federal government to put a higher priority on bilateral and regional free trade agreements. The coalition has forwarded a letter to International Trade Minister David Emerson urging him to recognize the importance of free trade agreements.
Canadian Pork Council Executive Director Martin Rice says, although multilateral negotiations through the WTO are important, there is a concern that Canada is not giving sufficient attention to bilateral and regional free trade agreement possibilities. “We certainly want to see the government follow through on those negotiations that are officially started such as Korea, the Central American four, such as the European free trade agreement areas,” said Rice. “Some of these negotiations have been going on for several years and we should get those finished up. On the other hand we would like to see the government focus on the possibility of free trade agreements with China, Japan, some the Andean countries which the US is just recently announcing deals with, India and Morocco.”
While some of these markets are more important to the pork sector, but Morocco would be of more importance to the pulse and the cereals industry. “We’re not suggesting shifting resources away from WTO negotiations but we could find ourselves at a disadvantage relative to our major competitors in terms of having inferior access conditions to some of our major pork export markets,” he said. Rice points out we’ve seen our major competitors, including the U.S, Chile, Brazil and even China enter into a number of free trade agreements.