CALGARY – Years of work by the prairie beef industry to break into the lucrative Japanese market should soon pay off, says a trade official from the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo.
Ron Davidson, an embassy counsellor, told a conference on agriculture value-adding last week that the Japanese market is opening up to imports.
And Canadian beef, which has established a toehold in the market, should benefit.
“I think you are going to see a lot of rapid growth in beef imports there during the next few years,” Davidson said in an interview. “I’m quite confident that the Canadian share of the market is about to show dramatic growth.”
Read Also
Short rapeseed crop may put China in a bind
Industry thinks China’s rapeseed crop is way smaller than the official government estimate. The country’s canola imports will also be down, so there will be a lot of unmet demand.
His news on the cereal side of the business was less optimistic.
The embassy official described multibillion dollar opportunities opening in the rich Japanese market as the domestic farm industry declines, trade barriers fall and Japanese consumers develop more of a taste for imports and a non-rice diet.
Imports soar
During the past five years, the value of food imports have risen 40 percent to $35 billion (U.S.)
Yet he also reported that so far, the effort by Canadian exporters to market cereal-based products has been nothing short of dismal.
Canadian baking-related products hold just 1.5 percent of the Japanese import market, 13th among nations and well behind the United States, Australia, Singapore, New Zealand and Taiwan. In 1996, Canadian baking-related products sold into Japan were worth less than $11 million.
Performance poor
Across the board in grain-related products, Canada trailed far behind.
Its main agricultural export is unprocessed canola seed, which the Japanese crush in their own plants.
Davidson encouraged Canadian food companies to make greater efforts to gain a larger share of the world’s largest market for food imports.
“There is opportunity across the board, for everything,” he said.
While traders from other countries are fighting for Japanese market share, Canadians often content themselves trying to increase exports into countries like the U.S. and Western Europe, which are stepping up their own Japanese export programs.
However, Davidson warned that the Japanese consumer market is not easy to break into, nor to satisfy.
“What they want in products is perfection and lots of service,” he said.
