Japan’s earthquake and nuclear crisis seem to have had little effect on its trade with Canada.
“No, we haven’t seen any disruption in the pipeline,” said Lach Coburn, west coast manager for Cargill Ltd.
“Fortunately, we didn’t have a lot of vessels heading to Japan at that particular time.”
Most of Japan’s wheat and oilseed processing industry is in the south. Little processing takes place in the northerly areas that bore the brunt of the damage from the tsunami and nuclear impact.
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Darrell Bushuk, in charge of the Canadian Wheat Board’s Asia trading desk, had a similar reaction.
“There wasn’t too, too much impact on our business,” he said. “Mills con-t i nu e d to operate and Japanese demand hasn’t declined much.”
However, he said some shipping companies were reluctant to send ships to Japan in the early days of the crisis because of concerns over the damaged nuclear reactors.
As well, some processing plants shut down for five or six days to assess damage and figure out the logistics to continue bringing in grain while avoiding damaged areas.
” There was lots of uncertainty initially, but now most people expect overall demand won’t be affected very much,” Bushak said.
The board doesn’t expect its annual sales to Japan to be affected, he added.
Jacques Pomerleau, president of Canada Pork International, said business initially suffered a little bit, but things soon settled down and returned to normal.
“It’s very, very much business as usual now and we expect it to stay that way,” he said.
That is mainly because most of the demand is in the unaffected south.
