Federal agriculture minister Lyle Vanclief appears poised to rescind an offer to co-fund with provinces a $200 million cull cattle program that would have paid producers $159 per head for each slaughtered older animal.
On Nov. 7, he said objections from the industry and provinces meant a program he had expected to announce last week may never be announced. And he criticized packers for lowering prices to take advantage of promised government help.
“We’re trying to come up with something that tries to please everybody,” the minister said Nov. 7 outside Parliament. “That may not be possible, so maybe we won’t announce anything.”
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He said there were objections about the amount of money, who would get it, when the program would run and how it would be paid.
Vanclief also accused the packing industry of positioning itself to take advantage of the program at the expense of farmers and taxpayers.
“A week or so (ago) when word got out there might be a program, packers I’m told, dropped from paying up in the twenties cents to farmers. They dropped down to two to seven cents,” said the minister. “Maybe there shouldn’t be a program and then packers will pay what they should be paying. It’s obvious right there that the packers were going to take advantage of transfers in federal and provincial money and the farmers weren’t going to be any better off.”
As Canadian Cattlemen’s Association president Neil Jahnke sees it, farmers likely weren’t going to be better off anyway.
The Gouldtown, Sask., rancher said the plan proposed by the federal minister was flawed, because it required slaughter before compensation would be paid. He said that would lead to a run on slaughter plants and the type of price drop witnessed when stories about the proposed program were first published.
In September, beef industry leaders had proposed a one-time payout to farmers with cattle that would have given them the discretion of when, or whether, to send their older cows to slaughter. Federal and provincial ministers rejected it because there was no requirement that the cows be taken out of the national herd.
“I think that would have been a much more market neutral program that would not have cost the government any more,” said Jahnke. “The problem with this latest idea is that they had to be dead and the run on the market would have driven prices down. A bad program is not better than no program and this was a bad program.”
Vanclief’s proposal was that the federal-provincial program would be in effect for a year, Sept. 1, 2003 to Aug. 31, 2004, which would have allowed enough time to clear as many as 665,000 older animals out of the system.
The proposal was to top up packer cull cattle payments by $159 per head plus $1 per day to help cover feed costs between Dec. 16 and the day of slaughter, no later than July 15, 2004.
Ottawa would pay 60 percent to a maximum $120 million. The provinces would pay 40 percent but they would not have to join for Ottawa’s 60 percent to flow to that province.
A frustrated-sounding Vanclief told reporters that the plan might fail after months of industry and opposition lobbying for a cull cow compensation program because too many interests were unwilling to agree on details.
“Maybe we need to sleep on it for awhile,” he said. “We’re having great difficulty because some groups keep changing their minds, sometimes (within) 24 hours.”
