Agriculture committee  Certainly. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'm pleased to have this opportunity to meet with this committee today. The pork value chain round table is dealing with a number of things. The Canadian pork industry is world-renowned for production standards and high-quality products. In 201

Agriculture committee  We have enjoyed a forum where the major players that consist of our value chain round table have really been able to be in one place at one time, and that's very important. As producers, we often suspect that everybody else in the value chain is very profitable except us, but by

Agriculture committee  In terms of risk management?

Agriculture committee  Well, we've been moving forward in how we can manage risk better by using some of the commercial tools. Of course, hedging forward-selling product is quite a challenge for smaller producers in particular, so we're working on a program where.... The real issue around small produce

Agriculture committee  Well, really, the mechanism to forward price is in the private sector. The ability for producers to really access that fully is.... They need some help. Bankers, particularly in our sector, where we have had difficult years, their willingness to secure margin accounts for a produ

Agriculture committee  Yes, South Korea is a very premium market for us. They would rank about third or fourth in terms of value of exports last year, but in terms of the value per kilogram, they would rank only behind Japan, which is sort of the premier-premier.... We are disappointed that we have not

Agriculture committee  The investment the federal government has made in Prince Rupert we view as very positive, but it's taken a long time to make it practical to use that port. Our major exports for pork are Japan and Korea, and we're also exporting to the Philippines and other places. The time from

Agriculture committee  If I may, the challenge with meat is that it's a product that requires swift action and refrigeration or freezing. You know, “Sell it or smell it.” It's not only the logistics of getting containers to places, it's making sure that it actually moves in a very timely manner and the

Agriculture committee  We actually have an interesting thing going on in Canada. Although we're the third largest exporter of pork globally, 30% of the pork consumed in Canada actually comes from outside of Canada, mostly the United States. Part of that is because the big retail chains want to deal wit

Agriculture committee  Yes. So now we're actually getting around as an industry. We've left the branding part to the processors to date, but as producers we really feel that it's our product that we're very proud of, and we can't sell it to you as a consumer if you don't even know it's Canadian. We

Agriculture committee  About 95% of the pork we produce actually goes through a very stringent food safety process program. We've branded it Canadian quality assurance that the Canadian Pork Council manages. When we talk to other people selling branded product, they tell us we have a good story to te

Agriculture committee  Through discussions with our partners in the value chain, we've come to the conclusion that we have a problem. The problem is that more American pork comes in and our consumers are actually eating less pork year over year, so it's a double whammy. We've committed, as the Canada

Agriculture committee  There are about 1.3 million sows today producing 27 million hogs per year. Of that, probably 1.1 million would be housed through their production cycle, the maternity part, in gestation stalls. The part being questioned today is whether we can continue that practice into the futu

Agriculture committee  The Canadian average would probably be 22. The very best producers would have 30 plus.

Agriculture committee  There's a misconception out there that we're going to make stalls disappear completely. That's not true. During the farrowing process, when they're having the piglets, and the piglets are very susceptible to having a very large mother lie on them, there's no jurisdiction saying t