Good morning, everyone. My name's Christina Burridge. I am the executive director of the BC Seafood Alliance. The alliance is an umbrella organization whose 17 members represent about 90% of wild-harvested seafood from Canada's west coast, and that's worth about $850 million annually.
We work closely with the Seafood Producers Association of B.C. They represent the major processors of wild seafood, and the two associations work very closely together, and our views almost always align, and they certainly do on trade policy.
There are three things we look to from government: secure access to the resource, a modern and stable regulatory regime, and market access. Those are the three things that we cannot do ourselves.
Almost all the seafood that Canada imports comes in duty-free, and our goal is that our trading partners ultimately reciprocate that access. B.C. exports about $1 billion annually of wild and farmed seafood; roughly two-thirds of that goes to the U.S.A., and one-third to Asia. Access to the U.S. is already duty-free under NAFTA. Almost all the exports to Asia, some $337 million, are wild seafood such as prawns, crab, sablefish, salmon, geoduck, sea urchins, and sea cucumbers. That breaks down to about $179 million to China; $108 million to Japan; $31 million to Hong Kong; and almost $19 million to Vietnam.
Japan and Vietnam are the immediate prize for us in the trans-Pacific trade partnership, but we share the hope of many that China might eventually join. Tariffs on seafood products in Japan range from 2.5% to 10.5%, while almost all imports to Vietnam are subject to 20% tariffs. Our closest competitor is the state of Alaska, which produces the same species in the same product forms, and sells them to the same markets, but which has the advantage of out-producing us in terms of volume, by up to 10 times.
We saw first-hand the gains made by Alaskan seafood exporters when the KORUS FTA with Korea came into force in 2012, three years before the Canada–Korea agreement came into force. They gained a market advantage through lower tariffs that has been hard for us to match.
It would be disastrous for us if the U.S. ratified TPP but Canada did not, immediately making our products uncompetitive in Japan and Vietnam, making it impossible that we could develop new TPP markets such as Malaysia, Brunei, or Peru.
In addition to the tariff advantages of TPP, we are strong believers that the codification of rules assists Canadian exporters dealing with non-tariff barriers such as phyto and phytosanitary issues. Consistent rules consistently applied benefit all exporters.
We advocate for TPP, because access to affluent and increasingly affluent consumers on the Pacific Rim is the best way to increase value from a limited resource. Access means, first, dollars to the Canadian economy, and jobs and income for families and communities up and down the coast. It's the lifeblood of our sector.
Thank you for the opportunity to make that short statement.