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8 THE RURAL VOICE
Jeffrey Carter
Pork industry's direction unclear
Jeffrey
Carter is a
freelance
journalist
based in
Dresden,
Ontario.
It wasn't all that many years ago
that the marketing of hogs in North
America was a democratic exercise.
Farmers with pigs had a good idea of
the price on any given day. It didn't
matter all that much,if they were big
operators or small. The going price
was the going price.
Things have changed.
Today, no knows what the
average price a pig sells for is. A veil
of secrecy has been drawn over the
industry.•
In Ontario, provincial directors
with the "marketing board" are
reluctant to speak their minds
publically. Cooperative marketing is
purely a voluntary exercise. Most
producers chase contracts.
Just who are the winners in all
this?
The traditional producers —
smaller family operators — must face
wild swings in the marketplace. They
haven't asked for this system. In fact,
many of their number were against it.
And what about the larger
producers, like the folks who own
Premium Pork? Time will tell as far
as their profitability is concerned.
Meanwhile, I think they must contend
with a fair amount of stress. There's
all that debt to consider and they may
not be the most popular people in the
countryside.
The packing industry is still
looking for stability in the
marketplace. Their margins must not
be prodigious, considering industry
consolidation and the downward
pressure on workers' wages.
There's a new group that's
emerged in the last few years. The
middlemen are back, the drovers of
the new millennium, moving pigs
from Canada to the United States.
Drover may be a term with a negative
connotation in farm circles but the
drovers of 50 years ago played a
similar role as today's brokers and
others who facilitate sales. Their
potential for profit is related on their
ability to move pigs, not the market
price.
Setting aside the retail industry for
the moment, just the public is left to
consider. Pork is certainly affordable
for the vast majority of North
Americans but in a roundabout way
there's still a tradeoff.
For any member of the public
living near a large pork operation this
becomes obvious. It's far less
obvious to people out of smelling
distance.
Nutrient loading in the
environment is a growing problem.
At least that seemed to be the
unspoken consensus at the National
Conference Nutrient Management
held in Waterloo earlier this year.
There may be technological
solutions to the manure problem but
there's at least one other concern
North Americans should be
concerned with: the growing
concentration within the hog
industry.
There's far fewer pig farmers, just
a handful of packers, and the
distribution/retail sector in both
Canada and the U.S. is controlled by
a surprisingly small number of
players.
Doug Maus of the brokerage firm
M&F Trading suggests that the pork
industry in North America may
follow the same route as the meat
chicken industry and become
controlled from the top down.
Seems a strange place to go, in a
society that supposedly believes in a
free and open marketplace.0
The Rural Voice
welcomes your opinions
for our Feedback letters to
the editor column.
Mail to: The Rural Voice,
PO Box 429,
Blyth, ON NOM I HO