Canadian Farmers Encouraged to Focus on Meeting Canada's Food Needs, Expanding Value Added Processing and Diversifying Export Markets

Amid a simmering global trade war, a former Manitoba Liberal leader is calling on Canadian agriculture to put a greater emphasis on supplying more of Canada's food needs, adding more value to Canadian agricultural products within Canada and diversifying Canada's export markets.Retaliatory tariffs imposed last month by China on Canadian canola, pea, pork and seafood imports in response to Canadian duties on Chinese-made electric vehicles and steel and aluminum products along with uncertainty over U.S. duties is pressuring Canadian farmers.

Dr. Jon Gerrard, a former MLA, Manitoba Liberal leader and federal Minister for Science, Research and Development and Western Economic Diversification, recommends supplying more of Canada's food needs domestically and cultivating new export markets.

Clip- Dr. Jon Gerrard-Former Manitoba Liberal Leader:

We produce a lot more food than we as a country can consume.We produce certain types of food in particular grains and oilseeds in large quantities and many other products which we grow but of course we produce less products like fruits and vegetables in the winter.That may be something that we should look at and see if there are more economical ways to produce fresh fruits in winter and replace imports.

That being said, there is no doubt that we are always going to need to be finding markets.I think that we have tended in the past to look at markets for canola seed for example, for wheat and increasingly we should be looking not just at processing in ways that we're doing at the moment but producing even more significant and high value products.

I think that's something that we should be developing much greater research and development capacity for.It is vital that we are very vigorous in our pursuit of other markets.

Dr. Gerrard suggests it is important to reach out to countries around the world where people are going hungry to build markets that are critically important to us.