Thank you.
Good morning, everyone. We'll make our intervention in French, but we'll be available to answer questions in both French and English as required.
Members of the House of Commons Standing Committee on International Trade, thank you for giving us the opportunity to comment regarding the draft agreement on the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Our intention in the next few minutes is to talk about Agropur cooperative, Canada’s supply management system in the international context, and the draft agreement of the TPP. We will finally give our point of view on diafiltered milk imported from the United States.
Agropur is a dairy cooperative owned by 3,367 dairy producers in Quebec, Ontario, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador. We have annual sales totalling nearly $6 billion. In Canada, 30% of the milk is processed in Agropur's plants. We have 28 plants in eight of the 10 provinces. Our 6,000 employees and 5,000 dairy producer families contribute to the economic vitality of many communities across the country.
Over the past few years, we have invested more than $1 billion in our Canadian facilities, our plants, our head office and the acquisition of six Canadian companies. We have also merged three co-ops, including in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, in order to better meet our Canadian customers' needs. In addition, we have a presence in the U.S., where 44% of our sales are generated.
I will now talk about supply management.
Last year was a year of mobilization at Agropur. We played an important role as an ambassador for our industry throughout the year. During the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, we energetically defended the supply management system. We believe that the leadership and mobilization of all stakeholders who believe in the supply management system gave the federal government the support it needed to be able to defend supply management against other countries that wanted it to be entirely dismantled.
I will now briefly tell you about a study on supply management in Canada produced by Boston Consulting Group (BCG), which we circulated. The study made it possible to compare the Canadian system to that of a number of other countries in the world, particularly countries adhering to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, New Zealand, Australia and the U.S., as well as European countries.
We feel that this study is very thorough, professional and credible, and that it advances a different point of view than the Conference Board of Canada and similar organizations that are not in favour of supply management. In essence, the BCG study shows that dairy production continues to be widely supported around the world, whether in the U.S. or in New Zealand. The study also shows that no country has managed to make a success of dairy industry without massive government support, whether on the financial or regulation front. Let me give you a few examples.
Australia has completely deregulated its industry. And its dairy production has been falling.