Agricultural trade promoters regularly claim that Canadian agriculture overwhelmingly depends on exports.
Last week was no different, when the Canadian Agri-Food Trade Alliance claimed in a brief to the House of Commons agriculture committee studying a trade deal with the European Union that “nine out of every 10 farms in Canada depend on exports.”
Liberal agriculture critic Mark Eyking, a vegetable farmer from Cape Breton, N.S., was skeptical.
“I don’t know where that number came from, I find it hard to believe,” he told CAFTA executive director Kathleen Sullivan Nov. 5.
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Sullivan said it is based on a George Morris Centre report from years ago.
The study concluded that 50 percent of all Canadian farm production is exported, and many products sold in Canada are priced on world market prices.
“We have a lot of products that we sell domestically, but our farmers are still price-takers and the price is based on world markets,” she said.
”Even if we are growing our product domestically and selling it domestically, we still have to pay a lot of attention to what goes on around the world because it has a significant impact on us.”
Eyking said the explanation does not justify the claim that 90 percent of Canadian farms depend on exports.
