Alberta is not happy with the volume of chicken it can
produce under the national marketing agency, so has served notice it intends to
withdraw.
The nub of its complaint is the failure of the national
agency to allow for “differential growth”.
That’s the same issue that the Chicken Farmers of Ontario marketing
board leaders claim they have been pressing for years.
Some Ontario processors, particularly small-volume ones that
believe they could rapidly increase sales to niche markets, can’t get enough
chickens, but the large companies which dominate the Association of Ontario
Chicken Processors argue for limited volume.
The Ontario chicken board has asked for market-growth
allocations, despite the objections of the larger-scale processors, but then it
has doled out that additional volume on a pro rata basis to all processors.
That means the processors with high-growth potential remain
stymied.
Ontario has never pushed the “differential growth” issue as aggressively
as other provinces which have been successful in getting larger volumes.
British Columbia played that card, stayed out of the
national agency for 10 years while its production increased, then came back
into the national agency.
Shortages for some Ontario processors prompted them to shop
for chicken in Quebec and that eventually led to competition that took about 10
per cent of production from each province into the other one.
That has now ended under an agreement between the two
provinces and their marketing boards, but it has not resolved the underlying
issue.
One example is Cami International Poultry Inc. which can’t
get even a fraction of the birds it needs from Ontario growers, mainly because
the chicken board refuses to meet its needs.
Cami is taking the board to court.
What do these chicken farmers tell federal politicians about this situation when they're in Ottawa pleading for continued trade protection?
