Winning the fight against country-of-origin labelling isn’t winning a war.
It’s winning an epic battle in an endless war.
The endlessness of U.S. trade actions against Canadian farm products means that even if COOL is dismantled without being replaced with other offensive legislation, Canadian farmers can never rely on having unfettered access to the U.S. market.
Because Canada’s domestic market is tiny, hedging our exposure to the United States means aggressively expanding or finding markets overseas, even if those markets are vexatious, unreliable and even more obstructionist than the U.S.
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This might sound pessimistic, but in my own, relatively short 20-year career at The Western Producer I’ve covered multiple U.S. attacks on Canadian crops and livestock, in-cluding wheat, hogs and cattle. I’m not referring to the trade complications any trading nations will occasionally have with each other’s products for legitimate reasons. Instead, I’m talking about what appears to be deliberate attempts to block market access for Canadian products as a way of boosting domestic U.S. prices for American farmers.
Perhaps it’s just my jaded Canadian perspective, but many of these acts of trade blockage have appeared to be nakedly protectionist. Sometimes they have relied upon claims of alleged Canadian subsidies and “dumping.” Other times they have been slightly more disguised, as with COOL.
What is most similar about them is that trade authorities, sometimes including the U.S. government’s own trade authorities, have not generally supported most of the claims and have eventually thrown out or condemned the offending rules or legislation.
That’s happened now as the World Trade Organization throws out COOL’s defences and opens the path to retaliation. However, how long will it be until the next trade barrier is thrown up?
That’s the question that should keep farmer support strong for Canada’s attempts to build its non-U.S. markets.
I called Jacques Pomerleau, the president of Canada Pork International, about this last week and he laughed about the notion of ever finding a market that doesn’t jerk Canada around at some point.
“It doesn’t matter the country,” said Pomerleau, whose organization is responsible for building the Canadian pork industry’s overseas markets.
“They all have their own interest, and you never know what they will try.”
Russia has been a frustrating market for many years but has sometimes been an important outlet for Canadian pork. China has its own complications but at some point could become as important as Japan.
Who knows where future trade barriers will arise? Does anyone believe they can foresee that? I assume not.
The only real defence is having such a wealth of foreign markets that losing one or two will not be devistating to Canadian farmers.
The U.S. will always hold a mighty hammer over Canadian farmers because its market is so big and so close, but if we can put some padding on top of the anvil, perhaps the future blows won’t fall so hard.
The U.S. is a great market. Farmers just need to remember they can never count on it, regardless of temporary victories.
