WINNIPEG (Staff) – The road to prosperity for agriculture doesn’t necessarily lead into the hold of a boat heading overseas or a rail car rolling south of the border.
Cynthia Currie, general manager of the Canadian Chicken Marketing Agency, said it would be a big mistake to lose sight of the potential at home.
“Sometimes we tend to ignore the very obvious,” Currie said in an interview last week. “And the obvious for us is there is still room to grow in the domestic market.”
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In the context of last week’s federal government-sponsored conference on the future of agriculture, that seemed like an almost heretical suggestion.
Increased exports have become the holy grail of the agriculture industry in recent years. Federal agriculture minister Ralph Goodale led off the conference by pointing to the goal of exporting $20 billion worth of agricultural products by 2000, up from current levels of around $17.5 billion.
He highlighted the government’s efforts to liberalize world trading rules, to conduct more trade missions overseas, to reorganize government trade services and to provide better market intelligence and credit for agricultural exporters.
But Currie sounded a different note in her opening-day speech.
While praising Ottawa’s role in helping to boost export sales, she said the bottom line for farmers is to sell more produce and it doesn’t matter whether it’s abroad or at home.
She said Canada imports about $9 billion worth of processed food products every year and that means there is a $9 billion market for food in Canada that is being taken up by imports. She noted that represents more than half the $17.5 billion of Canada’s total agri-food exports in 1995.
The government has emphasized the goal of boosting export sales by $5 billion, “but the benefit to Canadian industry would be the same whether we export that $5 billion worth of products or whether we displace an equivalent amount of imports.”
Currie said while she has no doubt that for chicken the domestic market is the area of greatest potential growth, she acknowledged that may not hold true for other commodities.
Jim Morris, president of Canada Pork International, an international marketing organization for marketing boards and packers, said in an interview later that Currie’s arguments do not really apply to the pork industry.
About two-thirds of Canadian pork is now consumed at home and it would take a major change in Canadians’ eating habits to change that.
“I think there’s some room for growth, but I don’t think it would be possible to expand consumption in Canada by 30 percent,” said Morris. “The export side is still where the growth for the pork industry is.”
Currie said the agricultural industry should look at market development that would benefit both the domestic and export sides. She said food industries could develop new products to service the rapidly expanding ethnic market in Canada and then take those products to overseas buyers.
