More to Europe than peas
Western Europe has long been a critical market for Canadian feed peas.
Through the 1990s, European feed manufacturers have bought about half of all Canada’s dry pea exports.
Gordon Bacon, president of Pulse Canada, recently told the annual meeting of the Saskatchewan Pulse Growers that the industry must try to diversify its marketing because several developments in Europe signal the pea market might be entering a period of uncertainty.
The original attractiveness of the European market was artificially enhanced by European Union policies that kept grain prices high and import duties on peas low. Also, Europe can’t grow enough feed protein to satisfy its livestock industry.
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But things are changing.
Environmental concerns about manure are putting pressure on European hog producers. The Dutch and French hog sectors were contracting even before Russia, the biggest buyer of European pork, ran into financial difficulty. This should lead to stagnant feed demand in the European Union.
Also, although cereal prices in the EU are still higher than the world price, they are dropping. Pea prices are also falling, making sales to Europe less attractive. And EU farm policies being developed for the year 2000 call for support to pea production that will be more attractive than for cereals, so European farmers might produce more peas.
Pulse Canada is trying to develop other overseas markets such as the Philippines, China, Chile and other Latin American countries.
But perhaps the most obvious potential lies right here at home.
Last fall, the pulse growers held a conference in Saskatoon to provide livestock feeders information on how Canadian-grown peas and canola meal can provide diets as good as imported soybean meal.
And for expert technical advice who was at the conference? European feed experts of course, the people who have been using Canadian peas for so many years.
Prairie pulse and canola grower organizations have co-operated to gather a library of information on peas and canola meal in livestock diets. Some of the information can be found on the pea-canola website at www.infoharvest.ab.ca/pcd.
If Canada could boost pea use in feed diets to the maximum, that would be a new market of 360,000 tonnes. Given that Canada produces about 2.3 million tonnes of peas, it would still have to export on a large scale, but marketing would be easier if sellers could say: “We use the product ourselves.”
