Integration in North American Agriculture Creates Common Ground on Trade Issues
The Canadian Agri-Food Trade Alliance suggests the integration of North American agriculture creates a great deal of common ground among farmers in Canada, the United States and Mexico
by Bruce Cochrane – FarmScape Online
The first round of negotiations aimed at revamping the North American Free Trade Agreement concluded Sunday.
“Because of the integrated nature of most of the North American sectors, we really do see a lot of commonality of interests between them”
“If we’re looking at agri-food, I think there’s a lot of optimism between the three countries with a tremendous amount of common interests,” Martin Rice, the acting Executive Director of the Canadian Agri-Food Trade Alliance said during his online interview with FarmScape Online. “We’re talking about modernization and bringing more of a 21st century type of trade agreement into areas of technical issues, the phytosanitary issues, as well as getting somewhere in terms of having common standards, common approaches to approving crop protection and animal health products, common standards and tolerances for different food ingredients, additives and so on, plus finding ways to reduce the amount of regulatory overlap or duplication while having more streamlined approaches to establishing regulations, and a further elimination of borders in a sense of how our products move between the countries.”
Rice says these negotiations will have a significant impact on North American agriculture.
“There’s been so much integration in North American agriculture that it’s not just a one way or a one time border movement,” he added. “We have a lot of supply chains; a good example is the swine and pork situation where you have baby pigs going from Canada to the U.S., being fed, processed, and products coming back into Canada for further processing and export. The same thing is happening between the U.S. and Mexico for their beef. So really, because of the integrated nature of most of the North American sectors, we really do see a lot of commonality of interests between them.”
Rice points out two way trade in agri-food between just Canada and the U.S. represents a billion dollars a week.
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