Farm-Scape is sponsored by Manitoba Pork Council and Sask Pork Play Audio Farm-Scape is a Wonderworks Canada production and is distributed courtesy of Manitoba Pork Council and Sask Pork.

Farm-Scape, Episode 1231

Canada Pork International says the Canadian pork industry's reliance on exports to the US has been reduced significantly over the past decade.

Canada Pork International acts as the Canadian pork industry's export development agency. Statistics Canada figures show Canadian exports in 2002 reached 813 thousand tonnes.

Assistant Executive Director Martin Lavoie says that represents an increase of almost 100 thousand tonnes over the previous year and the 12'th consecutive record.

"That places Canada as the leading pork exporter in the world. We reached that status three years ago and now the gap between us and the US is still growing.

Of course this is not considering the intra-EU trade so the order right now is Canada, the US, Denmark and Brazil has made a really good increase in the last three years. Our main export market is still the US with 411 thousand tonnes.

CPI was created to diversify our exports away from the US market.

Every single year we had an increase in our exports to the US but the percentage of our exports going to the US has dropped from 85 percent to a little more than 50 percent right now."

Lavoie says Japan remains Canada's second largest market followed by Russia and then Mexico.

He adds much of the Canadian pork exported to the US ends up being transshipped to Japan or to Mexico or to Puerto Rico which, if counted separately, would be in Canada's top five markets.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.