Canola tariffs into China

[mcfarms]

Read a disturbing article this morning that said that the Soybean tarriff into China has been lowered to 1%, whereas the Canola tariff sits at 9%. Doesn't bode real well for major sales into china.
Maybe Canada should be raising the tariff on all things imported by Canadian Tire.

[Fransisco]

And lets all be sure to thank our friendly neighborhood supply management farmers.

Nobodies going to be cutting tariff rates on our canola as long as we're still hanging on to Dairy tariffs in the range of 100-300%.

[cottonpicken]

And the rembi doesnt float.

[Fransisco]

<b>Let dairy farmers sleep - we'll buy somewhere else</b>

Agricultural marketing system rips off consumers

WILLIAM WATSON
The Gazette- Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Have you seen that great new commercial from the Dairy Farmers of Canada? It shows a herd of cows outside a barn at dawn and the premise is "What if, one morning, the dairy farmers just didn't get up?"

The consequences are disastrous. A little girl contemplating dry Cheerios. A mom finding only blueberries, no yogurt, in her yogurt cup. A short-order cook making a cheese sandwich with no cheese. A guy in a coffee shop exasperatedly throwing away his little cream container because it's empty. And then the kicker: The alarm goes off and a sympathetic grey-haired guy, your friendly neighbourhood dairy farmer, does get out of bed. Roll closing credits: "Canadian Dairy Farmers: Here for good."

It's a brilliant commercial (which you can see at http://www.taxi.ca/index.cfm?siteid=80&pid=15203&newsid=1542 if you haven't had the pleasure already).

Only trouble is it's wrong.

"What if, one morning, the dairy farmers just didn't get up?" The correct answer is that they'd be better off for the extra sleep and the rest of us would be better off because we could then import dairy products at world prices and not have to pay the $4.2 billion a year in higher prices that the OECD estimates our system of "supply management" costs us. (In fairness, that number also includes the cost of supply management in poultry and eggs.)

"Supply management" should actually be named "supply strangulation." In the 1970s, after a series of interprovincial spats - how Canadian! - over "cross-border" (within Canada!) movements of chickens and eggs, our governments set up marketing boards to regulate supplies. It became illegal to produce certain agricultural products without "quota," which now in dairy costs more than $28,000 per cow, according to Winnipeg's Frontier Centre for Public Policy. The quota has value, of course, only because the restriction of supply raises Canadian prices above what they would be in a free market. And the jacking up of Canadian prices is only possible because we block foreign supplies at the border.

How inflated are Canadian prices? Extremely inflated. Our tariff on milk is 241 per cent. On cream, 295.5 per cent. On butter, 298.5 per cent. You want some nice imported Parmesan cheese? That will cost you a tax of 245.5 per cent at the border. Prefer to get your protein from chicken rather than cheese? Prepare to pay 238 per cent extra for foreign chicken.

Some ice cream to go with all that? Pay at the border: 267.5 per cent. Or maybe a soufflé? Unfortunately, foreign eggs will cost you between 79 cents and $2.91 a dozen in duty, depending on exactly what kind you like.

Two conclusions are possible about a protection racket so successful it imposes border taxes averaging 250 per cent.

The first is that Canadian producers have world-record profits. In fact, as the marketing boards insist every year when they announce price hikes, although Canadian farmers are doing well enough to be "here for good" they're not cleaning up. Their costs are also high.

Which leads to the second possible conclusion, namely, that if Canadian costs really are two and a half times higher than foreign producers' costs, maybe these are industries we really don't want to be in for the long haul. If, instead, we made a deal with farmers whereby we paid them some fraction of the sum they currently cost us in inflated prices and they agreed to stay in bed, that would clearly benefit them, and we could import our eggs, chicken, cheese and milk at world prices, which would benefit us. It's win-win. Farmers get extra Zs; the rest of us get extra $s.

In the view of the farm lobby, that's a nightmare scenario: no more dairy farms in Canada. In fact, in Australia and New Zealand, two countries that have done major market-freeing agricultural reforms, many farmers adapted and stayed in business even after losing the legislated power to rip off customers.

William Watson teaches economics at McGill University.

[just_wondering]

Harper getting his picture taken with the Dali Lama might have something to do with it, those Chinese have long memories and don't take kindly to interference in local matters.
It might have been the right thing too do but their will be repercussions