Saskatchewan lost its bid to increase chicken production next year by 50 percent because it had not done its homework on the impact of such an increase, says Chicken Farmers of Canada chair John Kolk.
The Picture Butte, Alta., farmer said the organization is sympathetic to Saskatchewan’s desire to expand the industry.
But he said provincial representatives showed up at the CFC directors’ meeting in Saskatoon July 16 asking for an extraordinary quota increase to 375,000 birds per week from 250,000 without the required analysis.
“From the chair’s position, it seemed to me Saskatchewan has figured out the production end of things, how many chickens they want to run through,” said Kolk. “They were fairly weak in the area of what they would do with them, as well as the rationale for doing a 50 percent increase over eight months rather than over 24 months. There were no answers to those kinds of questions.”
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He said he expects Saskatchewan to appeal the CFC decision, and also to try again when it has done more analysis.
“It is part of a process going somewhere but at this point it is not strong enough,” he said. “People on the board were not comfortable that all the questions had been answered, that the product would be marketed in a rational manner and that they had all their ducks in order to make it work.”
For a frustrated Saskatchewan agriculture minister, the CFC decision had less to do with homework and more to do with regional power. Eric Upshall was less than enthused with the advice telling him to come back another day.
“That’s a stalling tactic in my books because we have been at this now for a year and a half,” he said in reaction to the CFC decision. “We’ve got some folks in Central Canada obviously who don’t want to see things change because they’ve got the lion’s share of the market. That’s not on.”
Upshall said Saskatchewan will appeal the decision through the National Farm Products Marketing Council.
Take a stand
But he also hinted that if it takes too long or Saskatchewan’s expansion plans are blocked, the province could reconsider its position in the supply-management system.
“It’s just not fair,” he said. “We’re not going to be handcuffed by an agreement that does not allow us to expand production in a place where it’s most logical to expand production.”
Kolk said his indications are that Saskatchewan is committed to staying inside the supply-management system and expanding according to the rules, although “one can never account for what agriculture ministers might do.”
He said the province should have learned the value of orderly marketing in the aftermath of its decision to encourage expansion of the provincial hog industry by ending the hog board marketing monopoly.
“If they did an analysis today, they would find they have no more hogs than they did two years ago,” he said. “But we have less hog farmers. I think that should teach them something.”
Meanwhile, even though CFC says Saskatchewan and the Prairies have been expanding production faster than other regions of the country because of a new allocation system adopted this year, industry figures published by last week contradict that contention.
According to figures compiled by Agriculture Canada, chicken production to July 11 is 11.2 percent higher in Manitoba this year than last.
However, in Alberta, the increase is just two percent and in Saskatchewan, less than half a percent.
The national average production increase was 3.7 percent and in Ontario, it was 3.1 percent.
In recent months, the production increase figures have been favoring the West.
