'We're not having any of that': Canadian Cattlemen's Association says it will resist U.S. protectionism

Breaking into Asian markets and holding on totheNorth American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) arehot topics at the second-annual Canadian Beef Industry Conference in Calgary from Aug. 14 to Aug. 17.

JohnMasswohl,director of government and international relations of theCanadian Cattlemen's Association,told the Calgary Eyeopeneron Wednesday that resisting U.S. protectionismwill be good for all beef producers in North America.

An excerpt of that interview follows:

Q: What's your biggest concern around NAFTA?

A:I think when we first started to hear about this, a lot of people were very concerned because the rhetoric that was out there was about tearing up the NAFTA and hearing what a terrible agreement it was.

It's our model of what we think a free trade agreement should be.

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We have heard a number of things about some of the protectionist elements and the U.S. wants to bring back certain policies. And we're not having any of that. So those are some of the message that we want to carry forward, and we're united on that.

Q: How much business does the American market represent for Canadian beef producers?

A:Well, for us, we have a large amount of exports to the U.S. and Mexico, both in beef in the box as well as live cattle.

So for the U.S. it's nearly $3 billion It's almost evenly split between beef in a box and live cattle. Mexico, we did a little over $100 million last year.

The Americans ship nearly $1 billion of beef into Canada, so it's beneficial for all of us.

Q:What kind of threat does the talk of "Buy American" threaten Canadian beef producers?

A: Whether we're beef producers or any Canadian agriculture and food procurers,the U.S. government procurement market is huge.

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For example, the U.S. military does a lot of eating. But all of that food procurement for the U.S. military, it all has "Buy American" preferences on it.

So there's a huge market in the U.S. that we have no access to.

Q: Do you think Canadian producers would ever get access to those kinds of government contracts?

A:[United States trade representatives]have said that they would like to have better access to the Canadian government procurement market.[It's] even at a sub-national level;so provincial procurement as well as local procurement.

I think it's a very persuasive argument to say, if intimes where tax dollars are short and people don't want to pay more taxes, politicians have an obligation to get the best value for money.

And you get that by opening up the biding to greater numbers of suppliers.

Q: What else will you be talking about when you meet with leaders from Mexico and the U.S.?

A:I do expect most of the meeting probably to be dominated by discussion of NAFTA and our joint, shared objectives for that.

We're probably also going to talk about some other things, some access to Japan.

We did have a Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement that the United States has decided not to join. We want to see how we can salvage that and eventually make some progress on that.

Q: What opportunity does Asia represent for Canadian beef producers?

A:The Japanese [market] is somewhere in the neighbourhood of $100 million a year for us as well.

And that access has been threatened somewhat by the fact that Australia has gone ahead and done a free trade agreement with Japan.

So we're very supportive of efforts to either do a Canada-Japan bilateral agreementor see if we can salvage the TPP in some way with the remaining 11 countriesand maybe even bring in some others.

It's hard to even comprehend the potential of [the Chinese]market.

We have gone from almost shipping nothing to China five, six years ago, to two years ago we did $255 million. It's sort of resettled in the sort of $60-million range.

We don't even have full access to that market yet. It's just unbelievable.

China can take more beef than all of Canada and the U.S. produce combined, so we're just looking to make sure that we have predictable access to that market.

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With files from the Calgary Eyeopener