The Canadian Cattlemen’s Association is concerned over China’s ban on Canadian Meat following what appears to be a falsified Canadian pork export certificates.

CCA Vice-President Bob Lowe says despite the incident being in the Pork industry the beef sector is also included in the ban.

“We don’t like to see any market vanish. This particular incident it’s starting to you don’t want to say for sure, but it’s starting to look like it was fraudulent documentation. From what I’m hearing from various Ministers in the Federal Government it may not even of originated in Canada.”

He says the Chinese market was well on its way to becoming very, very important: our fourth largest market taking 2.6% of our beef exports in 2018 or 1% of our production.

“In the first quarter of 2019 exports to China jumped by 400% and I don’t know the exact numbers but you can imagine a 400% increase is fairly big. The dollar value in 2018 was $97 million so if you jump 400% on that and it carries on throughout the year and you go from $100 million to $400 million. ”

Lowe feels we have enough markets that we can move that beef around and get it out of the country, but if you’re a feedlot and you did your whole operation to be ractopamine-free to hit the Chinese market this is devastating. 

“The thing about being Racto free is you can’t just have a pen that’s racto free, your whole feedlot has to be racto free, and the feedlot you buy your feed from has to be racto free.” 

He notes in order to increase our sales volume to China by 400% a substantial amount of feedlots are doing it.

Lowe says overall, what we’d like to see on a global basis is trade based on science instead of politics.

“You know if they can get this investigation done as soon as possible and get the borders open as soon as possible would be the ideal situation. Long term what you’d like to see is science-based trade policies as opposed to political.”

International Trade Diversification Minister Jim Carr says the government is trying to get answers as quickly as possible.

In the meantime, export certificates to other countries are not affected.