Thank you.
We've timed our presentation and we'll be well under ten minutes, hopefully.
The Grain Growers of Canada is an association of 13 canola, corn, wheat, barley, oats, peas, lentil, rye, and triticale commodity associations, as well as regional organizations like the B.C. Grain Producers and the Atlantic Grains Council.
We are an organization of progressive farm leaders who are looking for solutions. In fact we will put this on the record here today: we do not believe the government owes farmers a living, but we do believe it owes us a policy environment where we can make a living.
Access to markets like the EU is a policy area where government has a role to play. Individual farmers or farm groups don't have the power or authority to negotiate tariff lines or foreign policy. For that we need you, and that is why we are pleased to be here today.
The Grain Growers of Canada has been involved in these negotiations from the start, meeting with EU members of Parliament, meeting with EU country missions in Brussels, and meeting with the European Commission and individual embassies here in Ottawa. I believe we have met with every country at least once, and some as many as five or six times.
Why do we spend so much time and so many resources, you might ask? Canada has been blessed with an abundance of arable land, clean water, infrastructure like road and rail, and well-educated farmers capable of producing, storing, and shipping large quantities of grains, oilseeds, and pulse crops. Canada's agrifood sectors are very dependent on trade, and grain farmers even more.
It is not just the raw products like wheat or canola, which is what people think of when we say “export”. It is also our value-added products that create jobs here in Canada: processed peas and lentils, canola oil and canola meal, malt for beer, processed food, identity preserved soybeans—and in fact over one-quarter of Canada's agricultural exports to the EU are soybeans—Canadian pork, and Canadian beef. They are the best markets we have for the feed barley, feed wheat, and corn we grow on our farms. When they export, we win.
Here are some quick statistics to make our point. We export about $40 billion a year in agriculture: one-half of our beef, two-thirds of our pork, three-quarters of our wheat, and 85% of our canola.
Outside of the WTO and NAFTA, this is the greatest trade opportunity we have seen in decades. The EU has 500 million people. Their tastes are similar to ours, and they have an appreciation for the high level of quality that can be made in Canada. It is a market in which we have a lot of room to grow and it is a market that—despite the recent news on Greece—has cash to pay for quality.
Our exports to Europe are only one-tenth of what we sell to the United States right now. Don't get us wrong, the U.S. will always be one of our best partners, but as we learned during the BSE crisis, we must not be too reliant on any one market.
For some of our value-added exports like beef and pork, there is almost no access today, and on the grain side, issues like regulatory approvals for new crop traits are trade killers.
Any trade deal where access is not real is no deal at all. It is critical for grain farmers that an acceptable low-level presence policy be negotiated concurrently with this trade deal.
In our meetings with EU countries, we said we appreciated that their consumers do not want to buy genetically modified food and we respected that. We explained that we were not trying to export GM traits, but what we wanted was a policy where if a couple of kernels accidentally get mixed in, or there is some dust in the boat from a previous shipment, trade can continue. Once we explained this, we saw many of them nod their heads in agreement. They know, and we know, there must be an agreement on this issue.
I would now like to turn the mike over to Jim Gowland, who brings a lot of experience in exporting soybeans to the European Union.