The Canadian Cattlemen’s Association is pleased to see some progress being made on a future Canada-United Kingdom Free Trade Agreement.
Executive Vice President Dennis Laycraft says the UK is one of our highest value market.
"When we get into that market, we see a very good demand for high quality grain fed beef. And we've seen some challenges getting in there because of some of the carryover of the difficult procedures that the EU had set up. If we get those resolved, we think it could be a really good growth market for us. But it does come back to having the ability to get cattle approved, more, more readily, like we are in the rest of the world."
Canada has had a transitional agreement with the U-K since BREXIT occurred as a way to try and keep the market open.
Laycraft says what the U-K did was basically just overlay all the existing requirements that came about as a result of CETA (the Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement with Europe),
"We have quite a few problems with how difficult the procedures are there, the flip side is the CPTPP (Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Transpacific Partnership), which came into force a couple of years ago. We've had just tremendous growth in markets where there's more science based approach to the requirements. You get system's approval instead of plant by plant approval. Just a whole range of things like that. Which really kind of creates it as kind of the gold standard of ambition in terms of trade agreements, where CETA is the opposite of that."
He notes the U-K market holds a lot of potential, in the last couple of years Canadian Beef Exports to the U-K have gone from $17.7 million in 2020 to $7.6 million in 2021.
"We're pretty confident moving forward. The UK has been sending quite a bit of beef to Canada, albeit it tends to move more into our manufacturing trade. So, there's a potential we could have a win-win here. You know, that product that comes in typically competes with Australia, New Zealand, Uruguay, in particular. Where we compete at that very high end of the market over there."
According to Laycraft, one of the issues is the EU has a very politicized system where they have a Food Safety Authority, but every time there's any change, it has to be voted on in Parliament.
He says that's different than the rest of the world, where food safety is and should be science based and not politicized at the end.
"So we want to make sure, moving forward, we have a predictable system. Canada has one of the strongest veterinary infrastructures in the world, and our food safety systems are rated amongst the very best in the world. So we're looking for systems approval, which by doing that every plant becomes eligible to export to that market, they recognize all of the Food Safety interventions that we've improved in Canada, not trying to go through one line at a time, which we've done with the European Union. And, you know, by doing that, we'll have a lot more capital eligible and a lot more plants willing to process to go to that market."
He feels there's a fair bit of motivation on the U-K side to move this and get it done as they would like to get into the CPTPP, and they require Canada's agreement as one of the signatories.
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