Egg agency scrambles for peace amidst market plenty

THERE is something ironic and pitiful about the mess the Canadian Egg Marketing Agency finds itself in as it struggles for survival.

CEMA should be enjoying the best of times with growing markets, decent prices for farmers and optimism that things will get better. Instead, it threatens to blow itself apart as provinces complain they are not getting a big enough share of the goodies.

Quebec has quit paying millions of dollars in levies. Ontario may pull out in July.

Prairie governments are holding national supply management agencies to their own form of ransom – offer a larger share of national production or we may walk away.

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As agencies scramble to accommodate prairie political aspirations and to recognize lower regional feed costs, Eastern Canadian provinces are warning enough may be too much.

Does it sound familiar? It should.

It is the history of Canada, one of the world’s most blessed nations that appears to exist mainly to give its regions and provinces a chance to complain about being short-changed, a country built in defiance of the Old Testament warning against coveting your neighbor’s ass.

CEMA is being threatened by the economic growth dreams of its member provincial governments.

In his swan song speech as a CEMA director this spring, Peter Vriends of Prince Edward Island warned that farmers on CEMA’s board too often act as tribunes for their provinces’ agendas.

“Governments are using us as pawns, to some extent,” he lamented at a March CEMA board meeting in Ottawa.

Funny, that. Provinces that now see CEMA as a convenient vehicle for their growth dreams were not so visible when the egg industry and its marketing agency were in rougher waters.

In the 1970s, the CEMA suffered through the embarrassing “rotten egg scandal” when tens of millions of eggs spoiled in storage and supply management critics were in full voice.

Then-agriculture minister Eugene Whelan was one of the few politicians to scoff at the critics, reminding all who would listen that before CEMA, corporate power and interprovincial price wars made egg farmers low-income suppliants.

Through the 1980s, with changing market demands, falling consumption and multimillion-dollar CEMA deficits, provinces did not pull the plug but neither were they vocal in their endorsement of a supply management agency in trouble.

Through these tough times, the national marketing system survived and farmers rallied to the cause.

Now that the priority is sharing opportunity rather than misery, the common cause has eroded. The Canadian Disease of neighbor-envy rears its head.

Last month, CEMA chair FŽlix Destrijker used a poetic turn of phrase to plead. “We must of course take into account the comparative advantages but we must also ensure that those who have shared with us the mouldy bread of decline remain at the table to share the fresh bread of growth.”

He could have been more blunt. Faced with the forces of agri-corporate capitalism, he could say “if we don’t hang together, we’ll hang separately.”