Farmscape for May 23, 2018

The Vice President of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute is confident, despite missing another deadline for completion of a revamped North American Free Trade Agreement, a deal is still possible.
An informal deadline, by which the U.S. had hoped to have a revamped North American Free Trade Agreement in place to present to Congress, passed last week.
Colin Robertson, the Vice-President and a fellow of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, says while  there has been progress on several chapters of the agreement and a number of difficult issues remain unresolved. all three partners are demonstrating a desire to move forward with a deal.

Clip-Colin Robertson-Canadian Global Affairs Institute:
My reckoning is we still have many months ahead of us of tough negotiations and then resultant trade-offs before we reach an agreement but I do think an agreement is possible to be reached.
What is very encouraging is that, where as there was apparently no support two years ago in the Congress for the NAFTA, now there's a very significant chunk of Congress, we've had a couple of examples where over 100 members of Congress, from the Senate, House, went into the President to say "do no harm to the NAFTA" particularly as it relates to agriculture because the farm community has been very supportive of the NAFTA.
Recognition in the United States by the farm community of the two biggest markets are Canada and Mexico respectively and then amongst the business community who have supply chains that are set up in all three countries and a just in time delivery so, for them,, they don't want to upset and this particularly applies to the auto industry.

Robertson says we'll just have to see where all of this takes us but the good news is that we're still negotiating and we no longer have a fixed deadline hanging over the heads of the negotiators.
However he acknowledges there is still some sense of urgency because the United States is engaged in major trade negotiations with China so there appears to be a feeling that it would be nice to get this one out of the way sooner than later.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork