The end of summer means the barbecue season is coming to a close. Now is the time to enjoy the last of those sizzling steaks and burgers on the grill.
Fortunately, we can look forward to grilling more beef again next spring.
Not so for the last federally inspected beef processing plant in Saskatchewan. Nilsson Brothers (XL Foods) has decided that this end of summer is also the end for its Moose Jaw plant operation.
This is a private business decision based on the company’s own goals and bottom line analysis.
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But there are obvious public outcomes. Several hundred jobs are gone. Saskatchewan cattle producers have to swallow the extra cost of shipping product farther for processing, putting them at a competitive disadvantage.
There are also less obvious but equally real public costs such as the added cost on the road system from livestock trailers hauling cattle longer distances. A somewhat more subtle cost is the general environmental damage due to the added greenhouse gases from truck transportation.
Then there is the troubling pattern of growing concentration in the marketplace. This is a largely ignored cost that affects market choices, food security and even citizen freedom. Between the two of them, XL Foods and Cargill control 80 percent of the meat packing industry in Canada. This lends their private corporate decisions a great deal of weight. Cattle producers, buyers, truckers and eaters are now all dependent on these processors in one way or another.
The more concentrated and powerful the key players are, the more difficult it becomes to imagine, let alone create, viable alternatives. The post BSE drive to establish smaller, Canadian owned beef packing plants in the Prairies faltered in the face of this reality.
To be free is to have choices. The number of choices matter but so does the quality or significance of those choices. When key decisions about something as fundamental and significant as our food system are made behind closed boardroom doors by a handful of corporations, we are all left with both fewer and less significant real options.
The patterns of concentration and takeovers are not unique to the beef industry. Many parts of our prairie food system, including railways, grain corporations, farm input and machinery suppliers and grocery retailers, are moving in that direction.
There are ways to create more choices by instituting competition, restricting corporate takeovers or even establishing publicly funded options. Such government measures would insert competition and limit the control of any one large player in the marketplace.
Those who subscribe to the view that governments have no business interfering in the marketplace might reject such regulatory measures in favour of the so-called “free market.”
But how do fewer and less significant choices enhance freedom? Whose freedom? Like most other fundamentalisms, market fundamentalism ends up narrowing choices and thwarting freedom.
Protecting the sizzle of the beef from getting singed by industry concentration is in the public interest.
Nettie Wiebe is a farmer in the Delisle, Sask., region and a professor of Church and Society at St. Andrews College in Saskatoon.
