Enhancing Canada's Technical Market Access Capabilities for Agriculture

Enhancing Canada's Technical Market Access Capabilities for Agriculture
The CCA and its partners developed a comprehensive roadmap to enhance Canada’s export market access capabilities for agriculture.

Download the entire document - Enhancing Canada's Technical Market Access Capabilities for Agriculture [PDF / 272.12KB]

Recommendations Discussion Document

The roadmap lays out 25 key recommendations, based on in-depth consultations with major meat-exporting nations, Canadian market-access professionals, plus a comprehensive survey of exporters responsible for more than 90 per cent of Canada’s beef exports.

If adopted by the federal government, this strategy could significantly improve the industry’s outlook.

The strategy’s recommendations focus on a number of key areas.

Elevating the profile and perceived importance of agriculture market access within the federal government

• Creating a Cabinet Committee on Agriculture Market Access and establishing a Vice-President for Market Access to annually report on progress; encouraging more senior level participation in activities.

Improving government and industry collaboration in market access initiatives

• Joint participation is needed to set priorities and strategies, plus create a more prominent role for industry participation in outgoing/ incoming trade missions and negotiations.

Ensuring sufficient resources and communications to achieve agricultural market access objectives

• This starts with employing enough people to get the jobs done and ensures assigning the right kind of people to the right tasks. It offers career advancement opportunities within a market-access track, plus establishes succession-planning strategies.

Enabling Canada to learn from the best practices of other countries

• Australia and New Zealand are successful exporters of their agricultural products despite their size and geographic disadvantages. Canada can learn a great deal from their experience.

If implemented, the potential benefit of these recommendations to Canada’s economy is huge.
The initial impact of restoring all Canadian export markets would almost immediately add $100 of value to every head of cattle produced; creating optimism and encouraging growth throughout the cattle and other agriculture sectors.

By 2015, industry exports could increase by $6.3 billion per year. This would create over 93,000 jobs on farms, plus transportation, processing, sales and service sectors.