The North American Free Trade Agreement is working pretty well for agriculture, but could work better.
That’s something both Adrian Measner and Daren Coppock agree on.
But their prescriptions for how to fix it couldn’t be more different.
For Measner, chief executive officer of the Canadian Wheat Board, what’s needed is to let grain and oilseeds flow freely across the Canadian, U.S. and Mexican borders, as envisioned by NAFTA.
That means dismantling U.S. domestic trade laws that are now used to block shipments of wheat and have been used in the past against cattle exports to the United States.
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For Coppock, CEO of the U.S. National Association of Wheat Growers, what’s needed are changes to the CWB.
“In a simple sense, what it would take is having the wheat board trade at risk in the marketplace just like any other grain company does,” he said in interview from NAWG’s Washington headquarters.
“We need a level playing field.”
Measner and Coppock appeared on a discussion panel at the recent World Agricultural Forum congress in St. Louis, Missouri, May 18-20, talking about how NAFTA has affected agricultural trade.
While both had suggestions for improving the agreement, they also agreed that it has been generally beneficial, with agricultural trade among Canada, the U.S. and Mexico roughly doubling over the past 10 years.
However, Measner said not all commodities have benefited equally.
He said the volume of Canadian exports of hard red spring wheat and durum to the U.S. is roughly the same now as it was in 1993, at about one million tonnes of hard red spring wheat and 500,000 tonnes of durum.
By contrast, shipments of U.S. corn to Canada have climbed from well under one million tonnes annually in the early 1990s to four million tonnes the past two years.
In 1993, Canada exported 3.7 million tonnes more of grain, oilseeds and their products to the U.S. than it imported.
By 2002, that surplus had disappeared, with Canada importing 800,000 tonnes more than it exported.
Measner acknowledged that the numbers will fluctuate from year to year.
“There has been increased trade flow and that’s positive,” Measner said. “But we can’t continue to have the level of harassment that’s going on with wheat and durum.”
Coppock said there have been trade offs among commodities as trade patterns have changed, but rejected the idea that there have been winners and losers.
