Thank you for the opportunity to appear as part of this important study. I was with you not too long ago, wearing a different hat, but today I'm joined virtually by my colleague, Janelle Whitley, senior manager, trade and marketing policy, and we will be sharing our time for opening remarks.
CCGA represents Canada's 43,000 canola farmers on issues that impact their farms' success. As the world's largest exporter of canola, Canada exports 90% of what we grow as seed, oil or meal, and was valued at $14.4 billion in exports in 2022.
International trade underpins the canola sector's $29.9-billion annual economic contribution and its 200,000 Canadian jobs nationally. Canola's success is based on international trade and continual innovation. Landmark agreements such as CUSMA, CPTPP and CETA cover close to two-thirds of our markets and are fundamental to maintaining existing and building new customers.
Core tenets of these agreements are the elimination of tariffs to enable competitive access, clear rules of trade to provide predictability and transparency, and, importantly, a platform to strengthen trade relationships.
Today's study is timely. Agriculture trade is increasingly dominated by non-tariff trade barriers—measures detracting from these tenets and creating risk to grow and capitalize on market opportunities, adding costs to access certain markets and establishing barriers to needed innovation to advance agriculture's sustainability and resilience.
If not designed properly, the increase in policies and programs to advance our climate change and sustainable development goals can also undermine our trade policy objectives and competitiveness.
CETA provides a good example. Tariffs on canola were eliminated, creating new opportunities in the EU biofuels market, but the canola sector continues to lack market certainty. The agreement has been in place for over five years, and we continue to face non-scientific requirements for crop protection products, delays in approvals for new crop varieties from biotechnology, and differing approaches to environmental and social protections. While CETA provides the mechanisms to raise our concerns, it has yet to yield practical solutions and efforts to truly strengthen our trade relationship and offer predictability. We face the same issues with Mexico.
I will now turn it over to Janelle to comment on how this translates to the farm, and to offer some recommendations.