The Rural Voice, 1981-09, Page 12AN OVERVIEW
The sheep industry
Easter 1981. If you're an
Ontario sheep farmer it was
like a bad dream.
It was about that time when
an exporting company in New
Zealand shipped about
180,000 pounds of chilled
Iamb carcasses to Canada,
just in time for the religuos
holiday season and a waiting
ethnic market in and around
Toronto.
The key word is chilled. For
a decade New Zealand
producers have provided
about eighty per cent of the
Iamb consumed in Canada,
but always it arrived frozen.
The chilled meat at Easter
was in direct competition with
the homegrown offerings of
sheep farmers in Ontario and
Quebec. And it hurt.
"It did a great deal of harm to the Ontario sheep industry," says
Walter Renwick, of R.R. 1 Clifford, a fulltime commercial
producer and vice-president of the Canada Sheep Council. "It had
psychological effects as well as monetary. People were expecting
good prices for their Easter Iambs, to pay off bank loans. and it
just didn't happen. There has been a reduction in the growth of
the sheep business in Ontario. After Easter a lot of ewes went to
market."
Last Christmas, Canadian lambs were selling at between $1.80
and $2.30 a pound live weight. Farmers were anticipating about
51.95 per pound at Easter but imports from New Zealand slashed
that to between $1 and $1.30 per pound.
The Targe ethnic community, at which much of the Ontario
product is aimed, prefers fresh (chilled) meat to frozen, and until
this year that meant Canadian lamb.
"The weaker prices before Easter weren't entirely due to that
(the chilled imports) but it certainly aggravated it," says Grant
Preston, of R.R. 1 Proton Station, another producer and president
of the Western Ontario Lamb Producers. "We've been able to live
with the frozen imports from New Zealand but this chilled meat
could be devastating to us. It's not just the swine and beef people
who are having money problems."
Preston believes the sheep producers are caught in the middle
of some complex international trade agreements. where
commerce takes precedence over sentiment. He's not sure it will
be easy for Canada to reverse the stand it took last Easter, though
he's been a frontline warrior in the battle that's been raging ever
since.
"We've asked our (association) members to write their
members of parliament," says Preston, "but our strength has
by Dean Robinson
been minimal because there
are so few fulltime producers.
We've had very little clout,
but that's changing.
The Canada Sheep Council
made a presentation to the
federal minister of agri-
culture, Eugene Whelan, in
May, and also appeared
before the government's
standing committee on agri-
culture at its hearing on Bill
C46 (the meat import act). In
its initial brief, the CSC asked
that imports of fresh lamb
from New Zealand be dis-
continued and imports of
frozen lamb from Australia
and New Zealand be held to
an average of the last five
years.
In a second brief the
council asked the federal
government to implement a permit system on all imports of Iamb
and mutton. Says Renwick, "We have to convince the government
to put all meat imports on a permit system and monitor what is
coming into the country and when. Then if we think importers are
doing anything detrimental to the sheep industry we would sit
down with them and try to get an agreement to smooth out the
schedule of imports. We must get a handle on our destiny."
Dorothy Sloan of Willowdale, secretary of the CSC, says
council president Ron Gordon, of Alberta, met with Whelan in
Edmonton in late July. and the minister gave assurances that
there would be no repeat of what happened last Easter. Now, she
says, it's a matter of wait-and-see.
The bullets in the war stop well short of the supermarket meat
counter, and it's unlikely many consumers even know there's a
problem.
It's the men in the middle making higher profits because they
can buy imported lamb for a lower price than they can buy
Canadian.
Renwick believes the sheep producers should put another
lobbyist in Ottawa. They were happy with a six-month stint by
Gary Benoit (also a professional lobbyist for the cattlemen) but he
has since moved to Alberta. Says Renwick, "Too often we find
ourselves in the position of reacting to something that is
already law, rather than having the opportunity to change
something before it is legislated.
This seems to be the year of the waiting game for Canadian
sheep producers. Besides the ruling on New Zealand imports,
they are also watching closely negotiations with the United States
regarding scrapie, a disease that affects the nervous systems of
sheep.
PG. 10 THE RURAL VOICE/SEPTEMBER 1981