Canada's dairy farmers take stock of their losses under EU trade deal
Monday, November 18, 2013
by SUSAN MANN
Dairy Farmers of Canada says the impact to the country’s dairy industry of the cheese provisions in Canada’s trade deal with the European Union amounts to a loss of milk production the equivalent to Nova Scotia’s.
By the numbers, it’s nearly $150 million a year or a 2.2 per cent cut in farm quota for Canada’s 12,500 dairy producers, states presentation notes by Wally Smith, Dairy Farmers president.
Smith’s Nov. 7 presentation to the federal Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food in Ottawa also included requests for the federal government to work with the country’s dairy industry to ensure its stability and to ensure the deal’s impact on dairy farmers be “fully mitigated.”
The EU’s access will total 31,971 tonnes or 7.5 per cent of the Canadian cheese market. Imports from all countries will jump to nine per cent of the total Canadian cheese market from five per cent.
In total, the estimated impact to dairy farmers and cheese makers is a domestic market loss valued at $300 million annually, Dairy Farmers says.
Standing committee chair Bev Shipley, the MP for Lambton, Kent, Middlesex, says the committee is holding hearings on the trade deal. It will be hearing from agricultural commodity organizations, processors and agriculture groups from across the country up until Christmas. A report will be released after the presentations are done. After the Christmas break the committee “would then deal with that report.”
Shipley, who once owned a purebred dairy operation, says significant growth in domestic consumer demand for specialty cheeses will offset the domestic industry’s market loss. He says demand has been growing by 8,000 tonnes a year and notes an artisan cheese maker, who testified on the same day as Dairy Farmers of Canada, talked about the growth and the opportunity it presents.
Dairy farmers “will in the end see it as an opportunity, also,” he says. Moreover, the agreement includes a provision to evaluate the deal at the end of the transition time. “If there is deemed to be a negative impact there will be some compensation for it. It’s actually a great protection for them.”
Just because European specialty cheese will be allowed to come in “doesn’t mean it has to,” Shipley says. “We’ve got great products and we have great dairy farmers. I think they have a great opportunity to take up a majority of that domestic growth in Canada.”
Standing committee member MP Ruth Ellen Brosseau of the Berthier-Maskinongé riding in Quebec says 60 to 70 per cent of cheeses are made in Quebec. Brosseau agrees the deal’s impact on dairy farmers is more significant than has been reported and “we’re still waiting for the details. It would be a few months to a year before we have all the details made public.”
Brosseau, the deputy agriculture critic for the NDP, says in addition to waiting for more details, they’re looking to the government to outline “a plan for our farmers that will be impacted.”
She says she is hearing a lot of concern from Quebec dairy farmers about the deal “because they weren’t expecting this. They were expecting to have some give but” the actual amount of access given to the European Union was a big shock to them.
Shipley says the Canada-EU trade deal is the most comprehensive agreement that Canada has ever signed in history. It will be about two to seven years before the deal is fully implemented. The implementation will start happening after legal experts review the deal and it is translated into 24 languages. Both of those should take about two years and then there’s likely to be a five-year implementation period.
“There’s quite a transition of time,” he says. BF