Better lunches spurned

You can serve school children better meals, but you can’t make them eat.

A school district in Illinois tried putting healthier foods on the menu, including fish and baked-bean burgers.

“This past year and a half, we added entrées that had exceptional nutritional qualities, with the hopes to change our students' eating habits,” reads a note on the Feb. 5 elementary school lunch menu.

“Unfortunately, we could not persuade the students to select these items.

“Beginning in February, we will no longer offer two hot choices on the menu due to the extremely low participation of the second choice.

“We will continue our efforts to educate our students in the value of choosing nutritionally dense foods.”

Now their choices will be “cold items such as a turkey sandwich, yogurt combination, or hummus and flatbread and hot items like hot dogs, hamburgers, cheese pizza, chicken nuggets, tacos and mini pancakes with Canadian bacon.”

Canadian bacon? Now, if it’s really Canadian – as they could determine under Country-of-Origin Labeling legislation and regulations, we might send up a cheer.

But they still might not eat it.

Salmonella hide in beef lymph nodes

Guy Loneragan of Texas Tech University says salmonella can be inside the lymph nodes of cattle, making it virtually impossible to keep the harmful bacteria out of hamburger and many other beef products.

Yet David Plunkett of the Center for Science in the Public Interest continues to lobby for zero tolerance for salmonella in beef, matching the standard for E. coli 0157:H7.

“In any case, salmonella and lymph nodes is emerging as the biggest challenge the beef industry has ever faced,” says food safety communications expert Dr. Doug Powell.

During a panel discussion at MeatExpo ’13, other panelists said that means the only way to eliminate the bacteria will be to irradiate the meat at the packing plant.

But others say taking action before the cattle head to the packing plant is a possibility.  Vaccination is one of those options, they said. Probiotics and chemical inhibitors were also mentioned.

Al Almanza, who works for the federal government’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, said what’s needed before any action is more and better data to properly understand the problem, yet others said if salmonella really can be inside lymph nodes, more and better data won’t help much.

                                  

Chicken board eyes specialty markets

The Ontario chicken board is introducing a new program to exploit specialty markets.

It is inviting its quota-holding members and/or processing plants to submit business plans for developing new markets, ones that do not cannibalize existing markets, and is offering to supply them with chickens to meet their needs.

It may be a coincidence that this program comes on the eve of final negotiations with the national agency that should yield a major increase in the volume of chicken that Ontario will be allowed to produce.

The program was quietly launched with a posting on the Chicken Farmers of Ontario website a few days ago and gives the industry only a couple of weeks to meet the deadline of March 4 for applications.

Those who miss this deadline can try again in October which will be the annual application deadline for the next five years.

The board is calling for proposals to produce specialty chicken that is:

         “Any distict chicken product (unique growing or processing method) AND

         “Sold exclusively to a distinct market AND

         “Build overall market (without cannibalizing conventional chicken markets).”

The board will appoint a panel of four to six people to evaluate applications and make annual recommendations to the board.

While the program will be evaluated every year, it will be up for total review and/or renewal five years from now.

That policy review is to include the Ontario Independent Poultry Processors association, not just the Association of Ontario Chicken Processors.

The OIPP has been frozen out of membership on a Chicken Industry Advisory Committee that was formed in 2012 and is chaired by the Ontario Farm Products Marketing Commission.

During public hearings when the OIPP appealed that exclusion, there was testimony about work between the OIPP’s John Slot and chicken board staff to develop this program, but it was shelved because of opposition from the Association of Ontario Chicken Processors.

The chicken board says this new specialty market policy will be closed to farmers participating in the Market Development Program. That program has granted additional production volume to all processors on a pro rata basis, but they have to convince the farmers who supply them to participate by increasing production.

The board is going to charge five cents per kilogram for participation in the specialty market program.

Packer shutdown no idle threat

United States Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said Friday he is not crying wolf when warning that meat processing plants could go out of business if Congress fails to pass a budget by March 1.

“Every production line needs an inspector at the end, and if we have to furlough them, then production will stop,” Vilsack told the Des Moines Register editors and reporters Friday.

If they are shut down, it will cost the U.S. economy about $10 billion, according to an estimate from the United States Department of Agriculture.

Tom Vilsack

“This would be horrible,” Vilsack said. “Not only would the inspectors be furloughed, but the production workers at the plants could be laid off as well.”

The cuts to meat and poultry inspections are part of a package that will take effect March 1 if politicians fail to develop an alternative budget.

Debbie Stobenow

A proposal from Debbie Stobenow, chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee, is calling for a $27.5 billion cut in direct subsidies to farmers as an alternative to the layoffs, but admitted she has not yet consulted Republicans.

The USDA does inspections for red meat, poultry and eggs. The Food and Drug Administration inspects other food, drug and cosmetic production and would be forced into a similar reduction of inspections.

U.S., European begin preparations for trade talks

The United States and the European Union issued a news release to announce they have begun preparations to enter into trade negotiations.

The announcement comes as two years of negotiations between Canada and the European Union are stalled on three issues, one of them being Canada’s reluctance to yield its protection for supply management for the dairy and poultry sector and European reluctance to yield as much access to its beef and pork markets as Canadians desire.

Pharmaceutical patent protections and opening government purchases and tendering to European competition are the other issues.

That impasse was on the agenda for talks this week in Ottawa that involved Prime Minister Stephen Harper, but at the end of the day there was no deal for them to announce.

The news release on the U.S. talks came from President Barack Obama, European Council President Herman Van Rompuy and European Commission President José Manuel Barroso.

Both the Americans and Europeans expect their economies to benefit from reduced trade barriers.

That is also what Canadians have been saying, but it hasn’t weakened the resolve of Canada’s dairy and poultry farmers nor Europe’s cattle and hog farmers.

John Ibbotson of the Globe and Mail says Harper had better get a deal by April, else the Europeans will shift all of their attention to negotiations with the U.S. and Canada will be left out in the cold.

That, says Ibbotson, is what happened to Canada’s negotiations with South Korea.

Frankly, I see little reason why Canada needs tariff protection for the poultry industry. We have similar resources such as feed, genetics, and support services as the U.S.; all we lack is competitive chicken processors and it’s their own fault, especially Maple Leaf Foods, that they haven’t built a fully-competitive double-shifted high-volume processing plant.

Dairy is a different matter. There we need our trading partners to scale back their subsidies and trade barriers so we can match with increased market access and reduced tariffs.

But if our weak-kneed politicians continue to coddle the marketing boards, Canada might as well throw in the towel right now on trade talks with Europe and the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Quebec wants chicken concessions

The chairman of the Quebec chicken marketing board says in a newsletter to members that he’s holding out for an increase as part of a new deal to carve national production into provincial shares.

The provincial boards have agreed in principle to allow “differential growth” and have used population increases as a yardstick.

That will give Ontario and Alberta most of the increases, but Quebec would lose some market share.

Now Quebec is saying it wants a larger share based on the situation in Eastern Ontario where decades ago a number of chicken farms were established without quota to market birds to processors in Quebec.

When the Ontario chicken board discovered those barns, it tried to shut them down. There was a political crisis and the temporary solution was the creation of national quota administered by the national agency for those Eastern Ontario producers.

Later the Ontario board incorporated their production into the Ontario quota system, but in practice the birds continued to be marketed to processors in Quebec.

When Ontario and Quebec reached a new deal to stop inter-provincial trade in live birds, these Eastern Ontario farmers were part of the solution. About 700,000 units of quota moved from Ontario to Quebec.

Now the Quebec marketing board chairman says that’s not enough. He wants closer to 2.5 million units to be shifted from Ontario to Quebec, a total that is closer to actual production from the farms in Eastern Ontario.

This new demand is linked to the new allocation to provinces made by the national agency, not to the no-trade pact between Ontario and Quebec.

And the Quebec chairman is linking this demand to another argument – that the population of the Ottawa Valley and Eastern Ontario ought to be considered part of Quebec’s allocation from the national agency, not Ontario’s.

On that basis, Ontario would not gain any increase in market share and Quebec would not lose, but gain, market share.

This is sure to be one of the hottest issues when the provincial marketing boards meet in Ottawa this week.

The first meetings will be of the marketing boards only. Later there will be meetings that involve industry partners, such as processors and further processors.

None of this information about Alberta, Ontario and Quebec has been included in newsletters from the Ontario chicken board, or posted on its website.

In a related move, the association that represents small-scale chicken processors in Quebec has written an open letter to the association that represents the large-volume chicken processors complaining that the Ontario-Quebec ban on trade in live birds, combined with aggressive purchasing of Quebec birds by Nadeau Poultry Ltd. of New Brunswick, is leaving them short of enough birds to meet their needs.

They say they understand that Olymel and Maple Lodge Farms are in a battle for birds to supply their processing plants in New Brunswick, but say they are suffering as innocent victims.

They are pressuring the Quebec processors and marketing board to either get more birds from Ontario or find them in Quebec to meet their needs.

While the small-scale processors in Quebec have a recognized association to negotiate, the Ontario Farm Products Marketing Commission has refused to give a similar organization for small-volume processors in Ontario status and membership on the Chicken Industry Advisory Committee it chairs.

Some chicken questions

I have some questions for the leaders in charge of supply management for chickens.
But first, some background is required to understand the questions.
Nadeau Poultry Ltd., owned by Maple Lodge Farms Ltd. of Norval, Ont., has been complaining for years about competition from Westco and Olymel.
Maple Lodge's complaint is that Westco was taking away chicken it needs to keep running its Nadeau Poultry processing plant in New Brunswick and that the chicken were being processed by Olymel in Quebec, but now will be processed in a new plant in New Brunswick built in partnership by Westco and Olymel.
Having lost the political battles in New Brunswick, Maple Lodge (Nadeau) began buying chickens from Quebec farmers to supply its plant.
However, in Ontario, Maple Lodge was one of the leading members of the Association of Ontario Chicken Processors that complained loud and long about Quebec processors buying chicken from Ontario farmers, making it difficult for Maple Lodge to get enough.
This eventually led to a deal between Ontario and Quebec marketing boards and processors to stop the flow of live chickens across the Ontario-Quebec border.
It lowered the processors' costs because they no longer need to bid premiums to get chicken from farmers captive to processors in their home province, and presumably their trucking costs declined.
It wiped out millions of cumulative dollars farmers have pocketed in premiums while this inter-provincial competition was hot and heavy.
Ah, but you will have noticed that Maple Lodge, via Nadeau, is now buying chickens from Quebec farmers to keep its plant in New Brunswick supplied.
So, some questions:
1. Is the Quebec marketing board pressuring Ontario to make up for the chickens Nadeau is taking out its back door to New Brunswick?
2. Is there, as rumoured, a deal in the works between the Ontario and Quebec marketing boards that would move some Ontario quota, or production, to Quebec?
3. If so, why is the Ontario board continuing to refuse to supply chicken to CAMI International Poultry Inc. of Welland? It would be the height of hypocrisy to find quota to keep Maple Lodge (Nadeau) supplied while starving one of its competitors, CAMI International, out of business.
4.What plans do the chicken marketing board leaders have in mind to ensure that CAMI's customers for New York dressed chicken are supplied? 
5. What, if anything, are the Farm Products Council of Canada and the Ontario Farm Products Marketing Commission doing to ensure that the chicken farmers fulfill their obligation to keep the market supplied?
6. What, if anything, are those same supervisory bodies doing to honour commitments the prime minister and provincial premiers have made to eliminate inter-provincial trade barriers?
These are questions a reporter can ask.
But they are questions that chicken farmers ought also to be asking of their leaders. It's their business that is at risk.