It’s a case of the pot calling the kettle black, argues Al Mussell in a commentary on United States complaints about Canada’s skim milk exports.
He said Canada is in compliance with a trade deal among Canada, the United States and Mexico and needs to make that case.
“Canada needs a pragmatic response in which it listens to the U.S. concerns but does so with the knowledge that the U.S. is a much larger dairy exporter than Canada that deploys many of the same policy instruments that they complain about against Canada,” Mussell has written.
When the trade deal came into effect in July 2020, under which Canada agreed to limit exports of skim milk and milk protein concentrates to 55,000 tonnes and subsequently 35,000 tonnes.
Most recently, Canadian exports have ranged around 30,000 tonnes, Mussell wrote, while U.S. exports have doubled since 2010 to more than 100 million tonnes.
The intensity (i.e. the percentage of milk production) of exports of skim milk products is much higher in the U.S. than it is in Canada, and always has been, apart from the brief period of policy re-sorting in Canada in 2017-18 and Canada’s intensity of skimmed milk exports has been in decline since 201, Mussell wrote.
