The Trans-Pacific Partnership deal gives up a sliver
of the Canadian supply-managed dairy and poultry markets, according to a news
release from the federal agriculture department.
The deal
yields 3.2 per cent of the Canadian dairy market, with, the government says “a
significant majority of the additional milk and butter being directed to
value-added processing,” 2.3 per cent for eggs, 2.1 per cent for chicken, two
per cent for turkey and 1.5 per cent for broiler hatching eggs.
Those
imports will be controlled by quotas and will be phased in over five years.
Despite
those minor changes, the federal government is offering more than $4 billion in
compensation program. It's outrageous. These farmers are paper millionaires.
Quota-holding
farmers get a 10-year guarantee that their incomes will not decline, plus five
years of declining support. It would be nice if minimum wage earners could get similar guarantees.
That, says
the government, is worth $2.4 billion.
It is also
guaranteeing quota that is sold will not fall below current prices. The
government says it has $1.5 billion for that program. It would be just as sensible to guarantee house prices. In other words, not sensible at all.
Processors
get a $450-mlllion “modernization program” to improve their competitiveness and
$15 million will be added to their AgriMarketing Program. Did they not see this coming for at least a decade or two. Did they not line their pockets with supply-management profits?
Chicken
farmers get a promise that the border will be tightened on imports of spent
fowl.
That makes sense in the face of "spent fowl" imports last year that totalled more than the total U.S. population of spent fowl.
Spent fowl
importers will be prevented “from circumventing import quotas by adding sauce
packets to chicken products,” the news release says. How about checking imports to ensure the chicken is really spent fowl?
Supply-managed
products will be excluded from the Government of Canada’s Duties Relief
Program.
Cheese
compositional standards, introduced by the Government of Canada in 2008, have
been maintained.
“The TPP
will secure new market access opportunities for Canadian dairy, poultry and egg
exports. Dairy, poultry and egg producers and processors will benefit over time
from increased duty-free access to the United States and all other TPP
countries,” the news release says.
The dairy industry will, no doubt, be eager to dump surplus skim milk powder into the U.S.
“This will
include complete tariff elimination on some specialty cheeses, including
several artisanal cheeses, entering the United States.”
There is
no mention of fluid milk imports that have been flooding across the Eastern
Ontario and Quebec borders from New York and Vermont, milk that evades tariffs
because it has been stripped of some ingredients and therefore no longer
qualifies as milk under detailed tariff definitions.
Quebec
farmers have been mounting demonstrations to protest the imports which go into
production of cheeses and other dairy products.
