The Rural Voice, 2003-04, Page 31collectively and the economic
philosophy of the government
doesn't seem to matter. Single desk
sales agencies for hogs were lost in
Saskatchewan under the NDP and
Manitoba under the Progressive
Conservatives.
Manitoba's
agriculture
minister of the
time said the
hog producers'
monopoly
sales agency
had to go
because it
wasn't creating
enough
competition.
There is pressure on the Canadian
Wheat Board and supply
management for dairy and the feather
industries. Expect the next World
Trade Organization deal to limit,
rather than enhance, your ability to
bargain together, Wilson warned
farmers. WTO rules are a charter of
rights for multinational corporations
and they will press for lower tariffs
and limitations on the powers of
local governments, he said.
But if Wilson offered little hope
that the government would stick up
for small producers, a pew
opportunity came from a surprising
source. Chris Bedford of the Humane
Society of the United States seemed
a strange addition to the agenda until
he offered small producers a vision
of an entirely different marketplace,
one where their size was an
advantage, not a disadvantage.
Bedford, who is both a member of
the Sierra Club and the Iowa
Farmers' Union first warned Ontario
farmers they are about 10 years
behind the trends in the U.S. toward
corporate concentration. Iowa went
from 10,000 producers producing 15
million hogs in 1997 to 2,500
producers sending 14 million hogs to
market in 2002, he said.
"Change is not about size alone,"
he said. "Size is just a symptom of
something else: the industrialization
of the raising of animals."
Bedford worried the fewer, larger
livestock operations aim toward
uniformity, creating cookie -cutter
pigs. In fact the leader of one major
integrated pork operation said his
aim is for cloned pigs.
Barry Wilson
Too many medium
sized farms?
This kind of industrialization has
huge implications, Bedford said. In
poultry, research over the past years
has seen one day per year dropped
off the days -to -market of broilers.
Expect the same trend in hogs, he
warned.
In the U.S. four corporations
control 60-65 per cent of the hog
industry. In Iowa there is no
independent market. After the 1998
crisis, Iowa producers either went out
of business or became contractors in
order to have access to shackle space
in processing plants. Many borrowed
money on 10 -year terms to build
contract barns, but the term of the
contracts is shorter than 10 years,
leaving farmers vulnerable. "It
basically confiscates the land of the
farmers," Bedford said.
Some contractors have
agreements that pay them a
share of profits above the
average price but the price never
goes above average because the Targe
conglomerates control the market,
Bedford said.
"This industrialization is about
making you a controllable industrial
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