Thank you.
Thank you for inviting us to appear today to provide the Canadian cattle industry's views on “Product of Canada” labelling.
Indeed, the Canadian Cattlemen's Association, as the only national voice for nearly 90,000 cattle producers, is always pleased to appear before the committee.
With me today is Lisa Mina, the executive director for marketing of the Beef Information Centre. The Beef Information Centre is the market development division of the Canadian Cattlemen's Association, mandated to maximize demand for Canadian beef products in Canada and the United States.
To give some context to our comments that follow, it's important to understand the relative significance of imports and exports within the Canadian cattle and beef marketplace.
Canadian federally and provincially inspected facilities slaughtered approximately 3.4 million head in 2007. All of those, except for 5,053 head--that's 0.15%--were Canadian cattle, so we don't import many cattle for immediate slaughter. On the other hand, we exported over 1.3 million head of cattle to the United States in 2007, about 800,000 of those were for immediate slaughter and about half a million for feeding.
On the beef side of the equation, Canada imported 186,000 tonnes of beef in 2007, about two-thirds of that from the United States, and we exported over 360,000 tonnes, with about 80% of it going into the United States. If you take those numbers and you convert live cattle to beef equivalents and you total all that trade, we figure we're exporting between three and four pounds of beef for every pound we import. This is down from about a 6:1 to 7:1 ratio a few years ago.
With respect to product of origin or country of origin, we have had some opportunity to contemplate country-of-origin labelling initiatives in recent years. In particular, we have taken strong positions with respect to mandatory country-of-origin labelling proposals currently hanging over our heads in the United States. I don't intend to go into that issue in my presentation, but I would note that we have consistently explained to our trading partners that origin labelling is not a food safety measure, and we maintain that view domestically as well.
We do not believe that safety is a function of a food's or an ingredient's origin. Safety is a function of the regulations under which the food is produced, whether those regulations are up to Canadian standards and whether the product complied with the regulations when it was produced. If food regulations in a given country do not meet our Canadian standards, the offending product should not be available for sale in Canada, period. If other countries have appropriate standards, there should be adequate inspections and enforcements to ensure that food is produced in compliance.
We see the issue of “Product of Canada” labelling as distinct from country of origin labelling. Our understanding is that what the committee is examining is not a proposal to create new requirements to label products with their country of origin; rather, we understand the relevant issue before us is to determine what products may be identified and promoted as Canadian. And we would agree with that approach. To be clear, we would not support the creation of any new mandatory labelling requirement. CCA recommends a voluntary labelling approach, employed only when marketers determine that Canadian beef is of value in the marketplace.
Our second criterion is that any labels of promotional material identifying beef as Canadian must be lawful and truthful. We are aware of many instances when imported beef has undergone minimal or no processing in Canada but has been misrepresented as Canadian. When this occurs, the consumer may end up with a substandard experience, thus damaging the reputation of Canadian beef. Under existing law, the Meat Inspection Act, beef that is imported and not processed in Canada must be labelled with its country of origin when sold at retail. If imported beef undergoes some minimal process in Canada, it does not have to be labelled with its origin, but it is not Canadian. We believe that a greater enforcement effort is required to achieve compliance with these existing provisions.
Our third recommendation is that any rule to define what beef may be called Canadian must be consistent with the trade obligations by which we expect other nations to abide. We do not support designating Canadian origin on the basis of a percentage of value-added in Canada. This is an antiquated approach that is no longer meaningful in today's environment of global sourcing of inputs and is not necessarily supported by our trade agreements.
When NAFTA was negotiated in the early 1990s, it was the first comprehensive effort of the governments of Canada and the United States to define the origin of goods made partially or entirely from imported inputs via a specific production activity.
For beef and other meats, the NAFTA rule of origin specifies that the slaughtering of animals to produce meat is a substantial process that results in the meat having the origin of the country where the slaughter occurred. Therefore, we believe that any beef produced in a slaughter facility in Canada should be entitled to bear the “Product of Canada” label, regardless of the birthplace of the animal and without calculating constantly changing production values.
NAFTA also has another category of origin called “wholly obtained and produced”. This rule lists a number of activities, including animals born and raised entirely in a country. We believe that beef produced from such animals should be entitled to be voluntarily labelled as “Grown in Canada” should producers and processors be willing to adopt practices enabling them to prove that the product so labelled was indeed entirely born, raised, and processed in Canada. Those who cannot demonstrate a link from Canadian beef to a Canadian farm would nevertheless be entitled to label their beef as “Product of Canada”, if they wish to do so and the beef comes from animals slaughtered in Canada.
There are also relevant provisions in the WTO agreement that I will submit in my written comments to the committee, but in the interests of time, I won't read them.
For the remainder of our time, I am going to ask Lisa Mina to describe the Beef Information Centre's efforts to promote Canadian beef in Canada.