—and I'm here doing it. The other reason is that I hate cold. As you get older, you find that cold weather plays havoc with you.
I'm here to speak on behalf of our industry, so I just want to give you a bit of a perspective on what the dairy industry means in British Columbia. You've heard about Debra with her artisan business, but the mainstream industry, just in gross receipts to the primary producers, is an industry of about $560 million to $570 million in British Columbia. From there, obviously, it gets multiplied. One of the biggest factors about a primary producer, especially a local producer, is that he spends here, locally, every cent he makes and more.
In this province, I represent close to 502 producers—it changes daily—and about 353 of those producers are in the Lower Mainland. Like I said, I've been involved in this business for probably 30 years on the politics side and as a producer all my life.
I'm one of the fifth-largest producers in British Columbia. Just on our farm—if you want to google it, it's Donia Farms Limited—we have three boys at home who are all college grads. They all want to stay at home and farm. My father started the operation, we've taken it to another level, and I'm pretty sure they're going to take it to another level too. The future is bright if we can keep our industry intact.
On that note, I'll go forward with the presentation. I want to thank you for allowing me to speak here on the implementation of CETA.
This agreement with the EU is going to give additional tariff-free access of close to 16,000 tonnes of high-quality cheeses and another 1,700 tonnes of so-called industrial cheese. When combined with the access the EU enjoys now, there will be nearly 32,000 tonnes of European cheese coming into Canada every year. That is a doubling of the current EU access into the Canadian cheese market. It is vitally important for the Canadian government to understand that the European dairy industry is government-subsidized by close to 40%.
While sitting here today, I've heard some of the comments about supply management. Supply management doesn't cost the Canadian government any money. We get our prices from the marketplace. We do not receive any direct cash benefit from the government. I think that is a key point.
I'm going to jump around a little bit here, because for some of the things that were prepared for me, I'm a little bit uncomfortable saying them here.
From a broader perspective, CETA will push the total tonnage of cheese imported to Canada to more than 38,000 tonnes and increase the import market share from 5% to 9%. The significance is even greater when we consider that there is the potential to fill an additional 15% to 30% of the fine cheese market. This would mean that the EU would have the majority share of the premium market, with exclusive access to about 60% of the total fine cheese market in Canada.
Once CETA is implemented, the new access will be equivalent to 2.2% of Canada's milk production, a $150 million loss in farm income each year, 4% of the Canadian cheese market, and at least $300 million worth of cheese annually. It will reduce our milk production. It will cost Canadian dairy farmers, cheese-makers, industries supplying dairy farmers, and processors millions of dollars in lost revenue as a result of this foreign access to our market and projected market growth of our industry that has developed through farmer investments.
One of the key things I want to expand on here is that there is a check-off for advertising to enhance the growth of our industry in the supply management system we have. It may be through advertisements, incentives for new innovative products, lower prices, or a whole range of products to develop the market.
When this agreement with free and unfettered access—I shouldn't say free and unfettered access—but if they are within their quota, they don't pay any of that particular cost. The market we are creating, that we have established through the check-offs, through the advertising programs, through enhancements, through all these things I've talked about, these things they don't have to....
The beef industry in this country has won a check-off now for any importation that comes in. They will pay into the advertising program. I would think that this agreement as it sits right now... these people are taking a market that we've established. There's only 1% growth in our industry right now on an annual basis.
The implementation of CETA matters to us. If I read the agreement and what was told to me earlier through my colleagues, the program was to be implemented over a seven-year period. We would appreciate it if you would implement this agreement over a 10-year period. We understand it's going to happen, but at the same time we recognize that to minimize the impact, 10 years is something we should be looking at.
The other thing is that the supply management system we work under is faced with a tremendous amount of criticism. It was blamed for the lack of trade by a number of other industries sometimes. I want to give a little bit of a stat. It's a government stat, and it's put out by the Canadian Dairy Information Centre. It's the balance of trade. When we talk about trade, we talk about an economic developer. We want to create jobs. We want to have that spin of our dollars going back and forth. But under the supply management system we have today, we are in a trade deficit. As of 2012, the imports were $677 million; the exports were $439 million. Since 2003 and every year, there has been a trade deficit. Trade is a matter of balance. There are winners and there are losers between sectors. I understand that. But in the dairy sector, we've been in a trade balance for the last 10 years. It's your own stat that is telling us this.
In order for supply management to work correctly, we have to have predictability of imports. When this is taking place....I brought a glass of milk. I probably won't drink it because it has been sitting there and getting warm. I only like cold milk.
But you just see milk here. With today's processes, that milk is fractionated when it comes into the milk-processing plant. It is broken down into a number of components. Some of those components—and that's why the imports are coming in—will be broken into whey protein, casein, and a whole range of things.
The cheese that you have today is first broken down into fractionated products and then added back in. The dilemma we have is that our trade rules or barriers or those tariff lines have never captured that new technology of breaking down the milk products. So we have a whole range of countries right now that look at our captured market, that look at our supply-managed markets, look at the prices that we have here, and they say, “We want in, and this is how we're going to come in.”
Sorry, shall I slow it down?