The Rural Voice, 2006-11, Page 8FARMERS FEED CITIES!
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CD
4 THE RURAL VOICE
Keith Roulston
Lessons not learned
Keith
Roulston is
editor and
publisher of
The Rural
Voice. He
lives near
Blyth, ON.
If I was making my living in the
beef industry I'd want to get hold'of a
copy of the October issue of Report
on Business magazine, and after
reading it, I'd want to ask some
serious questions about my industry.
The article entitled Bum Steer is
truly remarkable coming from a pro -
big business publication like The
Globe and Mail which publishes this
magazine. The plight of farmers
usually doesn't get much play either
in the daily newspaper Report on
Business section or the monthly
glossy magazine — not as long as the
people who make money by selling to
farmers or buying from farmers
continue to be profitable.
But this article is kind to beef
producers, but not to the system
under which they produce, and not to
their industry's leadership whether
the Canadian Cattlemen's
Association, the Canadian Food
Inspection Agency or the packers.
The main point of the article
seems to be that the industry hasn't
learned much from its near -death
experience following the discovery of
one case of BSE in an Alberta cow in
2003 The major weaknesses the
crisis exposed were the industry's
dependency on U.S. processing plants
and the high ownership concentration
of Canada's packing capacity.
The concentration issue has
worsened since the crisis with the
purchase of Better Beef by Cargill. If
there were another crisis to trap
Canada's cattle at home, there'd be
one less bidder on the market.
In Alberta, the area of the largest
concentration of feedlots, three
American -owned companies control
nearly all processing of beef. In 2004
the Alberta auditor -general found
these companies had had an average
increase in profits of an incredible
281 per cent because of the crisis
because they could sell beef from
cheap Canadian cattle into the U.S.
market at U.S. prices with a markup
of 50-70 per cent. Yet because the
companies also owned cattle, despite
their massive profits they even
scooped up $45 million in emergency
government BSE aid for cattle
producers. And these are the people
that government and industry leaders
seem happy to support.
When a Peace River group got
together to build a co-operative beef
plant to process their cattle, one
Alberta Conservative MLA said co-
ops weren't the Alberta way of doing
business. Arno Doerksen, chairman
of the Canadian Beef Export
Federation said he didn't feel
producer -owned plants were a model
to "feel good about".
The federal Liberal government
and Ontario governments did attempt
to keep Canada from being so
vulnerable in the future by providing
financial assistance to expand
capacity in Canada but as the
proponents of a specialty packing
plant in Brussels found out, the new
federal government isn't interested in
that program anymore.
And who can blame them, really?
Canada increased its slaughter
capacity but now that the border is
open to live cattle under 30 months,
cattle are flowing south, leaving
Canadian plants running at only 60
per cent of capacity and losing
money. It's understandable the
government wouldn't want to risk
taxpayers' dollars on more plants that
producers themselves seem to be
happy to bypass while their cattle go
south.
This issue seems to illustrate the
industry's willingness to ignore the
lessons of the crisis. As soon as the
border reopened, people seemed
happy to pretend it never happened
and go back to the day before May
20, 2003. As a result, says Alberta
cattlemen Cam Osterman, who is at
the heart of the article, "the Canadian
cattle industry at the family -farm
level is.adrift." Since it's those
family farmers who keep our rural
communities going, this is troubling.0