Agriculture committee  Thank you very much to the committee for inviting us to attend. I'm Jurgen Preugschas, the chair of the Canadian Pork Council, and with me today is Martin Rice, our executive director. We do appreciate the opportunity to speak to you as our producers continue to battle the unprec

Agriculture committee  Thank you, Martin. I want to continue on with business risk management. During the past two and a half years our sector focused on ways to improve cashflow on hog farms and what was needed to move ahead through that difficult period, and you're quite aware of the asks that we h

Agriculture committee  I think, to answer that question, it's quite clear that we probably need to go ahead with a WTO challenge, but an answer for that is two or three years down the road, so what good is that when we're not in business anymore? Our point of view is that we need our government, our P

Agriculture committee  I think you make some excellent points. We do need to look at it as a Canadian thing, across Canada, rather than the regions. Due to the lack of a total Canadian approach, we've had some provincial reactions to attempt to save our industry. I believe we have to be creative. And

Agriculture committee  I think it's fairly safe to say that at the farm level in our integrated industry between Canada and the U.S., many of our producers who send weanling pigs into the U.S. to get them finished in the U.S.... Thirty-three per cent, I think it is, of those farms are now standing empt

Agriculture committee  I'm not saying I like it.

Agriculture committee  Maybe I can start. There are about 23 questions in there.

Agriculture committee  Okay, I'll be very quick. In terms of whether we are looking at orderly marketing supply management, absolutely no. We're an export market. It doesn't work, and let's not waste our time on that. It's just totally unacceptable. There's a lot of U.S. pork coming in. I believe it'

Agriculture committee  I think regardless of which area of the world we're looking at, trade access is critical. As was mentioned, if we can't do it through the WTO, at least we need to do it through bilateral agreements, and a 5% access without tariffs would be huge for us in the European Union. So

Agriculture committee  Absolutely. We work very closely with the National Pork Producers Council on the hog side. They're as opposed to COOL as we are and always have been. But what has happened is that the Bush administration had put the final rule in place. Then when the Obama administration came in,

Agriculture committee  No, there's no response as yet. We've had discussions with them, and the minister has been very good in terms of all the negotiations that were going on. We were quite informed and we were part of those discussions and suggestions on how to move forward; however, as yet, we have

Agriculture committee  We feel it needs to be addressed, as Martin stated. We need to go straight to the White House as quickly as possible.

Agriculture committee  As I stated before, I think we have to throw everything on the table. I think we need to be creative. I don't know exactly what the answers are and what the right thing is, but we need to get as many heads together as possible to see how we can do this. As I stated before, I bel

Agriculture committee  We're constantly in discussions with members of Parliament or the minister, but also with government officials. In fact, we have a meeting set up to talk to this specific issue in 10 days, so we will be exploring what possibilities might exist. I don't know where those discussi

Agriculture committee  There's no question that COOL and market access are on the top of our mind. Right now, though, in addition to that is our viability and the ability to continue as producers because of our financial crunch. The financial crisis our producers are facing is extremely important, beca