Trade negotiations no threat to supply management: Dairy Farmers

Monday, November 14, 2011

by SUSAN MANN

Dairy Farmers of Canada is reassured the federal government won’t ditch this country’s supply management system to gain access to the Asian-Pacific regional trade negotiations.

Dairy Farmers spokesperson Therese Beaulieu says in announcing that Canada wants to join Tran-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement talks, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said the federal government isn’t willing to pre-negotiate anything.

 “Joining the TPP does not mean getting rid of the system,” she says.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement is an Asian-Pacific regional trade deal being designed to enhance trade and investment, promote innovation, economic growth and development plus support job creation and retention. It’s being negotiated by the United States and eight other countries – Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam. Canada, Japan and Mexico have said they’d like to join the negotiations.

Beaulieu says the TPP is similar to the Canada-European Union trade talks that are going on now where everything is put on the table unlike previous trade negotiations where Canada was able to remove supply management at the beginning. In the European talks, supply management hasn’t come up yet because there are so many other matters in the negotiations.

For the TPP, “basically we’re looking at it as there will be talks, there will be pressure” for Canada to axe its supply management system, she says. But the federal government has said it supports the system and it will continue to defend it at trade talks.

Dairy Farmers’ view of how Canada will join the TPP talks differs from recent reports in several major Canada daily newspapers and articles on their websites that said the federal government is considering putting supply management on the table so Canada can join the negotiations.

During the past few weeks, several pundits have called on the federal government to kill Canada’s supply management system and have said that dairy farmers are preventing Canada from joining the TPP.

But Dairy Farmers says in a press release the system hasn’t stood in the way of Canada’s ability to successfully negotiate trade agreements in the past and is unlikely to do it in the future.

The supply management system for Canada’s dairy, poultry and egg farmers is built on three pillars – production to match demand, pricing that allows farmers to receive a fair return from the marketplace, and import controls.

In its release, Dairy Farmers says Canada is far more generous in the amount of imports it allows than most other developed countries. Canada imports more than six per cent of the dairy products consumed here. The Americans import about three per cent of the dairy products consumed there while in Europe it’s even less. BF