Saskatchewan’s hog marketing agency is lashing out at agriculture minister Eric Upshall for blaming SPI in his decision to end the provincial hog sales monopoly.
“I feel used,” said SPI Marketing Group chair John Germs. “I think producers have been raped in the democratic process.”
Last week Upshall announced SPI would lose its monopoly marketing powers next April 1. The agency now controls all hog sales in Saskatchewan.
SPI will still market hogs after the deadline, but will operate as a private agency, competing with packers and other marketing agencies for supply.
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SPI had intended to give producers a vote on whether to break its monopoly at its November meeting, but Upshall’s decision makes the point moot.
“I decided you weren’t really voting on orderly marketing anymore,” Upshall said the day after the announcement.
Upshall said he decided to unilaterally end SPI’s monopoly because of the agency’s recent deal that commits all its pigs to Intercontinental Packers of Saskatoon and Tai Wan Packers of Moose Jaw for the next five years. SPI owns part of both packers.
Not the purpose
Upshall said the deal prevents SPI from being the single seller of Saskatchewan hogs to a number of buyers, and betrays the original purpose of single-desk selling.
He said if the deal were to stand along with SPI’s monopoly, it would discourage expansion in the industry, discourage out-of-province producers from moving in and threaten other processors in the province.
“We, as a government, had to look at the whole picture,” Upshall said.
Germs took exception to Upshall’s statements that he was only reacting to SPI’s deal.
“I call that bullshit.” Germ added SPI set up the deal with the packers because Upshall told them last April that he was going to break the monopoly and they should get ready for it.
Germs said the SPI board didn’t tell producers about Upshall’s earlier warnings because the board thought it could work with the government behind the scenes to make SPI strong.
The government said it would provide a multi-million dollar transition fund to allow SPI to become a private agency, Germs said.
But the SPI board found out an hour before the announcement that it would not receive the money and felt duped, he said.
Opposite view
Florian Possberg, a large-scale hog producer from Humboldt and a longtime proponent of ending the monopoly, said he thought the government did the right thing.
“I’m not sure (a vote) would have solved anything,” Possberg said. “It might have created a messier situation.”
The deal with the Saskatchewan packers was the last straw for many large producers, Possberg said.
After the deal they thought the situation was hopeless and pushed Upshall to break the monopoly.
Possberg said about 200 farmers produce more than half of Saskatchewan’s hogs, and they wouldn’t have been happy if the larger number of small-scale producers denied them the right to sell their hogs outside SPI.
Many others, however, condemned Upshall’s decision, including the provincial Liberal party, the National Farmers Union, Intercontinental Packers and former SPI officials.
“His use of the sole contract with Intercon is really just an excuse to do what he wanted to do,” said Jim Morris, the former general manager of the agency, who was fired in the spring.
Morris said Upshall made it clear much earlier that he intended to end the agency’s monopoly and all the moves SPI has made since are a reaction to that.
He said if the contract was such a problem for Upshall, he could have broken the deal or replaced the board of directors.
Peter Volk, the 1996-97 chair of SPI, said he is horrified Upshall isn’t giving producers the right to vote on such a significant issue.
“In a democracy, people should be allowed to choose,” Volk said. “I think there should have been a vote put to producers, at least at the delegate level.”
Liberal agriculture critic Gerard Aldridge said producer democracy “has been trampled upon by the government taking this unilateral action.”
