They had that push-back down there. When it gets to labelling, they wanted to create a Canada-U.S. for fed cattle versus a U.S.-Canada or U.S.-Canada-Mexico for feeder cattle. It just became an inventory management problem for all distributors and retailers rather than some perceived benefit down there. Where there are alliances and the ability to do that, we think with our Canada beef advantage and some of the private branding initiatives that we'll be able to realize it without it being....
They estimate it's going to cost $3.9 billion to put in place the full country of origin labelling. Could you think of a worse time in history to be adding that cost into a meat complex?
As we move ahead, we believe there are the opportunities you talked about, but we think the systems we're working on will facilitate that.
Our concern as well is this de facto style of rule that the secretary has put out with the threat that if you don't adhere to these other costly procedures to do this.... In my opinion, we've already seen more evidence of problems in the pork industry than the beef industry. But de facto rules are a violation of the WTO, just the same as actual rules. We have to obviously be vigilant against that.
We prepared 25 recommendations in a report we tabled. The Beef Export Federation worked with the Pork Council, Canada Pork International, and others. There's a whole series of different things to increase our capabilities. This is our ability to negotiate market access in technical negotiations. It's how we take the combined strengths of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, the work of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in the negotiation of a veterinary agreement, in our case with CFIA, and working with industry.
It's very seldom just the science that's examined in these negotiations. If it were, every market would be open to us for virtually all our products. It's how you combine all these things, get the right people lined up, and do it on a timely basis. As we found with the border closing event, the questions were asked about what we spend in perspective. We're the third-largest live cattle and beef exporter. Our friends in the pork industry are often the largest pork exporter in the world. When you take a look at red meat, we're clearly one of the largest exporters and producers in the world. We need that capability to move forward.
I think we could spend an entire session looking at how we could make Canada the world leader. That's the essence of our report. We believe Canada should be positioned as having the greatest capability in this area, recognizing that we are one of the largest exporters of agriculture products in the world.