A joint statement from the Ontario and Quebec provincial governments, urging a shift in the federal negotiating strategy at the World Trade Organization’s talks on ag trade, has drawn concern from an exporters’ industry group.
The Canadian Agri-Food Trade Alliance (CAFTA) is concerned over the “apparently complete focus” on the interests of Canada’s five supply-managed ag commodity sectors in the Feb. 11 statement from Quebec Ag Minister Laurent Lessard and Ontario Ag Minister Leona Dombrowsky.
“While we recognize the government of Canada’s position relative to protecting supply management, (federal negotiators) also maintain a focus on securing an ambitious deal for export interests,” CAFTA executive director Keth Lancastle wrote Friday. “That seems to be lacking in the Ontario and Québec positions.”
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Dombrowsky and Lessard said a newly revised modalities text for a WTO agriculture agreement, put forward earlier this month by WTO ag negotiations chairman Crawford Falconer, “continues to fall far short of the necessary protections needed for Canada’s supply-managed industries, which includes the dairy, poultry and egg sectors so vital to the farm economies of the two provinces.
“With the revised text released (Feb. 8), it now seems obvious that technical negotiations will not offer Canada the flexibility necessary to accommodate supply management,” the ministers wrote.
Falconer’s text also drew criticism from representatives of Canada’s supply-managed commodity groups as well as from federal Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz, although Ritz said the text looks promising for Canada’s ag exports.
“The text provides the framework for a ‘good agreement’ — it could certainly be more ambitious — but given the need to balance the interests of over 150 member countries it is likely to be about as good as we might have expected,” CAFTA’s Lancastle wrote in an e-mail Friday.
CAFTA’s members include representative groups for several export-dependent commodities, such as the Canola Council of Canada, Canadian Cattlemen’s Association, Malting Industry Association of Canada, Canadian Pork Council, Grain Growers of Canada, Sask Pork, Alberta Pork, Alberta Beef Producers and grain company Viterra.
Lancastle cited a CAFTA document that describes 210,000 farms in Canada, about 91.6 per cent, as producing export-dependent commodities, including 88.4 per cent of farms in Ontario and 75 per cent in Quebec.
Those farms’ production, he said, represented about 77.6 per cent of Canada’s total farm gate receipts, compared to 70.3 per cent in Ontario and 54.7 per cent in Quebec.
The two provinces had noted in their statement that their combined supply-managed production alone accounts for about 67 per cent, or $4.8 billion, of Canada’s supply-managed farm revenue.
Canada’s supply-managed commodity groups had recently urged Ottawa to ensure that all supply-managed products are included in the WTO’s “sensitive products” category, without Canada having to pay an additional cost. They also want Ottawa to negotiate to ensure there are “no reductions to over-quota tariffs for sensitive products and no increases in market access” for exports of such products to Canada.
Asked about the prospects for a successful ag trade deal, in view of recent commentary suggesting a deal coming out of the Doha round of WTO talks is unlikely at best, CAFTA remains “quite optimistic,” said Lancastle, who soon travels to Geneva, Switzerland to monitor the latest WTO developments.
“The member countries have remained highly engaged, and key members — such as the EU and the U.S. — have offered important concessions in the last few months,” he wrote. “It seems unlikely that they would ‘play those cards’ if they did not see that an agreement was potentially within reach.”
Not all WTO watchers feel the same way. “Like the parrot in the Monty Python skit, it’s dead, cashed in its chips, fallen off its perch, bought the farm,” international trade lawyer Lawrence Herman wrote recently of the Doha round, in a Feb. 13 op-ed piece in the Globe and Mail, citing what he called the “unwillingness of key players to make the hard compromises.”
