Last week agriculture minister Gerry Ritz announced the federal government is acting on the advice of the Beef-Cattle and Pork Value Chain Roundtables in creating a market-access secretariat.

The secretariat will focus on gaining expanded access beyond the U.S. for agricultural and agri-food products in markets such as Mexico, China, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Russia and Saudi Arabia.

Key challenges related to market access for beef have included BSE and for pork export certificates for exporting into Russia and the use of Paylean.

Canadian Pork Council executive director Martin Rice expects the secretariat to provide better coordination of the various federal government departments on issues related to trade.

Clip-Martin Rice-Canadian Pork Council

This has been a key recommendation from the roundtables and also from the cattlemen's association and the pork council and also our export agencies, Canada Pork International and Canada Beef Export Federation.

It's really to have that coordination at a senior government official level, to have resources in that secretariat that would have as fast as possible, efficient as possible means of finding solutions, finding alternatives to deal with market access issues and have those alternatives and agreed solutions be shared between those different departments and have a joint coordinated effort right from the start.

Rice expects details of the exact form the market access secretariat will take and how it work to address these market access issues to be released over the next few weeks.