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Agriculture This Week: Political turbulence likely to hit ag product exports

Sadly open and reasonable trade has become farther from reality than it has been in years.
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The 'Trump' effect will have a farm exports impact. (File Photo)

YORKTON - For years the idea of lifting barriers to trade have been pursued by many countries – although World Trade Organization talks on agriculture have never been particularly smooth.

Food production at the farm level is of course about more than allowing one country to produce something because of conditions and technology, and other countries just lining up to buy what is produced.

In Canada of course producers tend to like that idea.

Farmers here do a very good job of producing many farm products from wheat to canola to oats to cattle, and the list goes on.

And of course our population here is not large enough to make much of a bite out of what is produced. We need only to recall the glut of beef in this country when BSE closed export markets for a time.

But, on the flip-side of that is a desire by many countries to become self-sufficient in food production – even if that requires trade barriers to import to make domestic production viable.

Now in a perfect world trade would go where it was needed unimpeded and that would be fine.

That is not the case though.

The supply of food from one country to another is never a guaranteed thing, and that means a country can only truly rely on domestically produced food – if Mother Nature co-operates on that.

In Canada here we can look in the mirror and see a rather steady trade partner.

We are steady producers of many crops – even in subpar production years there is usually product to export, but as is the case in many things Canada is not necessarily typical.

We live in a world where one country can never fully trust another.

We see that staring us in the face right now.

We may look at the invasion of Ukraine by Russia led by Vladimir Putin and nod knowingly that such a move by a power-graving Russian leader is not unexpected, and that Ukraine a country not in NATO was the target.

But, would most have considered even a year ago that a long-time member of NATO would be rattling its swords threatening a possible invasion of Greenland, or that is ready to start a trade war with its closet neighbour and ally with massive trade tariffs?

Well if you were betting on a Donald Trump win in the recent presidential election you would have expected four years of turmoil – but probably even the darkest prognosticator probable didn’t see how lose a cannon he appears poised to be.

So when one sees a report on China focusing attention on boosting cereal grain production to better feed its people (www.producer.com) it makes sense.

Sadly open and reasonable trade has become farther from reality than it has been in years, and even long held allies cannot be fully trusted. As a result the immediate future for ag trade looks very turbulent.

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