Working Group to Focus on Expanded Trade with India

CANADA - The federal government has announced the creation of a new working group to promote expanded trade in pork after signing new trade deals with India and Hong Kong, writes Bruce Cochrane.
calendar icon 20 January 2009
clock icon 3 minute read

Speaking to reporters, following his just completed trade missions to India and Hong Kong federal agriculture minister Gerry Ritz announced a series of trade agreements with both countries including a comprehensive memorandum of understanding with India covering a variety of products, expected to provide a framework to expand exports to India and resolve trade irritants quickly.

The creation of a pork industry working group comes in response to India's approval of the import Canadian swine genetics.

Ritz says the working group, builds on that announcement and will focus on opening the Indian market to Canadian pork even further.

Gerry Ritz-Canada Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food

Certainly we'll have the Canadian Pork Council involved.

Jacques Pomerleau of the Canadian Pork Council was traveling with us.

He met with industry over there as well and was working on some of those details.

The working groups will be finalized within the next days and weeks.

In that specific case it's a working group with India so it will be to move a lot more product into India.

They're very excited about bringing in a lot of our pork genetics.

Of course they do raise hogs over there but not to the productivity and capacity that we do with our hogs.

We've got just much more superior genetics.

They're interested even in looking at our feed rations and how we do those types of things, the housing and so forth.

So the agreement that we signed goes beyond straight trade into innovation and science and genetics and all those types of things so it's a good well rounded memorandum, that will allow us to move a lot more product at a number of different levels.


Ritz says details of who will sit on the working group and how it will move forward will be determined over the next days and weeks.

He notes Canada already sells half a billion dollars in agricultural exports to India and there's room for exports to grow, as India's population increases and people there look for new products.

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