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BBoreal Trade

ASEAN edition

Canada Food Export Readiness Index

Whether a Canadian food product can reach a market is decided before anyone discusses price, by three things that are a matter of public record: whether an agreement is in force, whether the destination publishes a list of approved establishments, and whether any Canadian establishment is on it. This edition applies those three tests to six Southeast Asian markets.

Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore meet all three. The Philippines and Thailand meet none: no agreement in force, no published establishment list, and no Canadian establishment approved. Across the whole register, 54 of 1,337 Canadian establishments appear on a destination approved list for any of these markets.

ASEAN edition · Sources last read 2026-09-24

The six markets

MarketBandAgreement in forceDestination list published forCanadian establishments on it
VietnamBand AAgreement in force: yesbeef and veal, pork, poultry42
MalaysiaBand AAgreement in force: yespork17
SingaporeBand AAgreement in force: yesbeef and veal, pork6
IndonesiaBand BAgreement in force: nobeef and veal, pork12
PhilippinesBand CAgreement in force: noNone0
ThailandBand CAgreement in force: noNone0

A zero in the last column is a fact about the published register, not about Canadian industry. An establishment may hold an approval under a number this build has not matched to a company, which is why the index reads “none on the published lists” and never “none approved”.

What the bands mean

Band A

Route established

All three criteria met. An agreement is in force, the destination publishes an approved-establishment list, and Canadian establishments appear on it.

Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore

Band B

Route partial

One or two criteria met. Part of the formal route exists; the rest is not yet on the published record.

Indonesia

Band C

No route on the record

No criterion met. The published record shows no route yet, which is not the same as a market being closed.

the Philippines and Thailand

Method

Each market is tested against three criteria, all of them binary and all of them readable off a primary source in a few minutes:

  1. An agreement is in force. Read from the trade agreement status published on each market page, which carries the Global Affairs Canada page it came from. Signed but not yet in force does not count, because a signature confers no preferential treatment on a consignment.
  2. The destination publishes an approved-establishment list for at least one Canadian category. Read from the CFIA export requirements annexes. The annexes do not cover the same species in each market, so this is recorded per category rather than per market.
  3. At least one Canadian establishment appears on such a list. Counted from the directory’s verified file, which records only approvals read off a published register.

Band A is all three criteria, Band C is none, Band B is one or two. There is no weighting and no composite score, because there is no defensible way to say that an agreement in force is worth some multiple of a published establishment list. Three binary criteria can be checked by hand against the sources, which is the property that makes an index worth citing.

What this edition does not measure

Market size, growth, competition, freight cost and how hard a market is to actually sell into are all absent. A Band A market is not a good market; it is a market where the formal route exists and someone has travelled it. Those are different questions and this index answers only the second.

Registration step durations are not scored. Every market here documents a six-step pathway, and the typical duration of each step is unverified across all six of them, so including it would rank markets on the state of our research rather than the state of the route.

Band C is the band most likely to be misread. It means the published record shows no route: no agreement in force, no destination list, no approved Canadian establishment. It does not mean Canadian food cannot enter, and it does not mean no approval exists. Where a route is being negotiated, the market page says so with its source.

Citing this edition

Canada Food Export Readiness Index: ASEAN edition, Boreal Trade. Sources last read 2026-09-24.

The underlying values, each with the source it was read from and the date, are published as a dataset on the data page. Corrections are welcome and are recorded on the changes page.

Sources