Thank you for having me today.
As you know, CAFTA is the voice of Canadian agri-food exporters, representing the 90% of farmers who depend on trade and the ranchers, producers, processors and agri-food exporters who want to grow the economy through better access to international markets.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak today with you about the state of global trade and what the road ahead may look like. The year 2020 was supposed to be a big year for trade for us with the ratification of CUSMA, the need to address CETA issues, non-tariff trade barriers and the lack of respect for international trade rules, the necessity to modernize the WTO, opportunities to diversify in Asia and the creation of a new post-Brexit trade relationship with the U.K.
Yet, in an instant, COVID-19 upended the predictability and stability businesses and exporters need. The last few months have shown us just how foundational agri-food trade is for our economy and way of life. While we’re proud of the role our members have played in feeding Canadians and the world while also protecting jobs in a time of crisis, clear worries remain.
Chief among them is the fear that this crisis will bring about new trade barriers and other forms of protectionism and that trade commitments will be undermined and not followed. Given the topics today, I will focus my remarks on, first, the need to continue to strengthen and improve existing trade relationships, the need to support WTO modernization and the rules-based global trading system, and the need to continue to open new markets, enforce free trade and put agri-food trade at the centre of the recovery.
Canada has no more important trading partner than the U.S. Our members are very pleased that CUSMA is now in force. It will help ensure a continued strong foundation for uninterrupted trade with our closest neighbour and trading partner. Restoring stability and predictability to North American trade is essential for Canadian agri-food exporters that have developed highly integrated supply chains for the past generation across the continent, and especially so in the U.S.
CUSMA will help restore the competitiveness in the North American free trade platform; normalize trade, not just for commodities but also for value-added food products; and enable a globally competitive sector that drives the economy forward in all three countries.
It will be important to monitor the proper implementation of the agreement to realize its full benefits. I will point to two sectors in particular. The food processing sector is concerned with the implications of the front-of-pack labelling regulation—a trade irritant with the U.S.—and, in the sugar industry, a key driver of food exports to the U.S., discussions on the administration of TRQs create a level of uncertainty of access.
It's very clear that the implementation of trade agreements is just as important as negotiating trade agreements and perhaps even more so. Take CETA, our comprehensive agreement with the European Union. It will turn three this September, yet despite holding so much promise for agri-food exporters, it continues to fall short. This is because the EU is not abiding by commitments to remove technical barriers.
We know there are solutions to these persisting barriers. Such work includes achieving mutual recognition of meat processing systems, developing protocols to verify livestock production practices, addressing misaligned regulation of crop protection products, more predictable and timely review of seed technologies, ensuring that Italy’s country-of-origin labelling requirements are not applied in a trade-restrictive manner and addressing production and trade-distorting EU sugar subsidies that make our exports uneconomical.
Italy provides an example where Canada needs to be assertive in defending our trade interests. Quiet conversations to date have not resolved the issues. It’s important that Canada challenges these so that Italy's protectionist measures do not spill over into other countries and products. We’ve asked the Canadian government to take up these issues with EU political leaders in order to secure commitments and timelines to remove and address the barriers that persist. As the world is moving toward the enforcement of rules, Canada, too, should step up its response and push for enforcement.
Vietnam, Peru, India and others—the list goes on of countries that do not follow internationally agreed-upon protocol, that do not live up to their bilateral and WTO commitments and that maintain unwarranted SPS measures. All of these create significant risks and uncertainty for exporters. Canada needs to be proactive and nimble in its response to the growing use of non-tariff barriers to block agriculture and food exports.
The current crisis has also shown us why we need a rules-based global trading system. CAFTA is pleased that the federal government has been at the forefront of efforts to safeguard the WTO and the rules-based trading system. This was done in large part through the Ottawa Group. The Ottawa Group, led by Canada, initially created to find ways to reform the WTO, has played a major role in keeping supply chains open to agri-food trade during the crisis and in seeking commitments from WTO members to limit and unwind the 200-plus trade restrictions adopted by 93 countries as a result of the crisis. It is imperative that this work continue.
In parallel, the Ottawa Group needs to drive forward WTO reforms to fix the dispute resolution processes to ensure their ongoing functionality, to revitalize the multilateral negotiation process and to restructure the overall governance of the WTO.
Amidst the crisis created by the pandemic, we must recognize that it's absolutely vital to get WTO reform right. We should fully expect that many countries will be tempted to use the current crisis to restrict trade and introduce non-tariff barriers disguised as excuses with protectionist motives. This is precisely why we need a solid, functioning WTO that can deliver on stable, predictable, open, rules-based trade as recovery begins to take root.
Now is the time to step on the gas—