Farmscape for January 10, 2018

An Agricultural Economist with Farm Credit Canada says a strengthening world economy is creating new opportunities for Canada's producers and processors of food products and retailers.
Agricultural Economists with Farm Credit Canada are encouraging Canadian food producers, processors and retailers to keep in mind trends in agriculture that could create opportunities for their businesses.
Craig Klemmer, a Principle Agricultural Economist with Farm Credit Canada, says 2018 looks fairly good but stakeholders will need to be flexible and agile to ensure they are well positioned for long term growth in the sector.

Clip-Craig Klemmer-Farm Credit Canada:
Developing economies continue to grow.
Incomes are rising and that creates opportunities for exports into a number of these markets.
Rising incomes in places like China and developing countries usually means more purchases of food products.
When we think about  the United States for example their economy is also starting to gain some traction and continuing to grow, wages are starting to increase modestly and that is going to create some opportunities in the U.S. market.
The European Union, we're starting to see better growth there.
Overall world growth is continuing to improve slowly and when we look at that from the food side of things it creates more opportunities for not only the exports of our commodities but our value added products as well.
I think that the unique situation, the diversity of Canada and the changing consumer demands here domestically and locally puts us in a position of strength to meet some of those demands and changing consumer behaviors in the export market as well for our companies and the agri-food sector.
I think that's great news and a good trend that's well positioned to take opportunity forward so it's exciting for Canadian food processors.

Klemmer says  we're not expecting to see huge increases in the cost of commodities coming into the processing plants and energy prices continue to be muted so from the cost side , things look pretty good overall for the food sector.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

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