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 1485

A partner with Meyers Norris Penny says past experience suggests US petitions calling for countervail and antidumping duties on live Canadian Hogs will result in a full scale investigation. The National Pork Producers Council has filed petitions with the US government alleging unfairly subsidized Canadian live hog exports are being dumped into the US, depressing US prices and harming American producers.

Meyers Norris Penny helped prepare the defense in similar cases involving Canadian live cattle in 1998 and wheat in 2003.

Ian Craven, who worked on the red spring wheat case, told delegates attending Manitoba Pork Council's annual general meeting, yesterday in Brandon, 75 percent of these complaints result in full investigations.

"Their initial determination is based on public information and it's a reasonable expectation that it'll proceed.

Basically they're using public information that's available without going to individual producers to try and determine what Canadian cost of production might be in a general sense and apply that to what they think market prices might have been in the US at that time. In terms of who's being affected, certainly the challenge is directly against people that export live hogs to the US.

I'm not a market expert but one of the things I think is fairly generally felt is that our hog market, for the most part, is driven to some degree by the US hog market in terms of price. Anytime your put a tariff on the border between the two of us, that has a good chance of negatively impacting the Canadian hog producers whether they export or not."

Craven says it's difficult to estimate that range of costs that will be involved in defending against the allegations if a detailed investigation is determined to be merited. He says that will depend on the magnitude of the investigation.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.