IT IS difficult to identify what is and isn’t a Canadian-grown product in the aisles of the local grocery store.
Foreign produced products can even carry an official Canada stamp, but that only means it meets this country’s grading standards.
This identification issue is a problem but also an opportunity, based on market research sponsored by the Canadian Federation of Agriculture. The research indicates interest in a “Canadian-grown” label program.
It found that most people think Canadian products should be labelled as such. They also said they would likely buy Canadian if quality and price were competitive.
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Most liked the idea of a label program for food grown in Canada that meets high environmental and health standards and provides a fair return to the farmer.
About half said they would pay more for food with such a label and about three quarters said they’d pay a larger premium if they knew the money would go to Canadian farmers.
These results are not surprising. Farmers always rate favourably in polls and there is broad public understanding that farm incomes are generally low.
The interest in safe, environmentally friendly food is also understandable, particularly with recent contamination issues fresh in consumers’ minds.
Incidents such as adulterated Chinese wheat gluten used in North American pet food and automotive antifreeze in Chinese-made toothpaste in Canada generate consumer worries that a “grown in Canada” label might be able to exploit.
But country of origin labeling, or COOL, can be used by protectionist interests to keep out foreign products.
For this reason, CFA is against the mandatory COOL law soon to be implemented in the United States for meat, fish, perishable agricultural commodities and peanuts.
COOL’s problem is its mandatory nature and the huge cost of record keeping that acts as a barrier to trade. Unbearable compliance costs could cause American buyers to pay less for Canadian product or simply avoid it.
There are also definition problems, like whether meat from a Canadian calf imported into the U.S., fed there and slaughtered in an American plant can be called American or Canadian.
And processed food can be so mongrelized with ingredients from many countries that it could never be assigned a country of origin.
That said, so long as the program is voluntary, targeted at whole, unprocessed foods and used only to promote the Canadian brand and not as a trade barrier, it is worthy of investigation.
Provincial food branding is already a familiar way to bring producer and consumer closer together. A Canada-wide scheme could complement those efforts and, if marketed the right way, perhaps even create opportunities to funnel premium prices to growers.
As the CFA notes, Canadian exporters have for years promoted the Canadian brand of healthy, clean and safe and food overseas. It is time to do so at home.
Bruce Dyck, Terry Fries, Barb Glen, D’Arce McMillan and Ken Zacharias collaborate in the writing of Western Producer editorials.
