The Canadian pork industry may soon have to reach out, grab Japanese
consumers and tell them Canada is a clean, safe place to make meat.
Canada Pork International president Bill Vaags told the Manitoba Pork
Council’s annual meeting on April 4 that Canadian pork could be
discriminated against if it’s not promoted as a good thing.
That’s going to cost money, and provincial pork councils may soon be
asked to foot some of the bill.
“Can we match the same kind of money the U.S. is throwing into the pot
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here?” said Vaags, a Dugald, Man., producer.
“We’re working on it. We’ll see what we can do. But we certainly don’t
want to lose that market. It’s a very important market to us.”
Vaags said American pork producers plan a $15 million advertising
campaign to promote their meat. Since supermarket meat counter cuts may
soon have to have country of origin labels, Canada will need to ensure
that Japanese consumers don’t veer away from Canadian pork when faced
with other options.
“If the Americans start doing it quickly, we have to be able to get in
there and do it just as quickly because we can’t just let it go by,”
Vaags said in an interview.
A small advertising campaign for Canadian pork is estimated to cost
$2.8 million.
Japanese consumers have been upset by repeated cases of retailers
caught illegally labelling imported meat as domestic, which led to
demands that the government force all retailers to label their meat
accurately.
Jacques Pomerleau of CPI said he hopes Canadian pork is labelled as
Canadian rather than simply as imported, because then it can try to
establish itself as a premium product.
Ted Haney, president of the Canadian Beef Export Federation, said
Japanese retailers have long been required to reveal all meat’s country
of origin, but that didn’t mean every cut had to be labelled. Instead
sections of meat counters could be labelled, often only revealing
whether the meat was domestic or foreign.
When meat is imported to Japan, it has to have country of origin labels
so that inspectors can verify where it comes from. Those labels do not
remain with the meat once it arrives in supermarkets.
Haney said beef exporters are happy to see the government enforce
labelling at the retail level.
“This will help us.”
Canadian beef has carved out a reputation for quality, so labelling it
everywhere it is sold will help it attract consumers, Haney said.
“We are actually looking forward to universal implementation of country
of origin labelling,” Haney said.
