About 250 employees have been off the job since February 17.
Local 240 represents those in the offices, and Local 1959 represents workers at the Ojibway Mine, plus a separate unit at the evaporation processing fields.
The union members voted down a previous tentative deal and now will vote on this deal.
A trap has been set up to try to capture a hog that escaped while being unloaded at Harriston Packers this week.
It has been roaming through back yards and along the Maitland River bank.
The Wellington Advertiser reported that the Ministry of Natural Resources set a trap near an apple tree the pig frequents to much on windfalls.
Minto director of building and planning services Terry Kuipers said “due to concerns about the pig causing a traffic incident and becoming injured, as well as concerns about damage to property and spread of disease, the MNR set a live trap.”
Russian drones struck Ukrainian grain facilities at the Danube River port of Izmail as Russia continues to try to stop grain exports from the Ukraine.
That is having a devastating impact on poor nations and people who have relied on grain from the Ukraine..
Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister Oleksandr Kubrakov said the port's export capacity had been reduced by 15 per cent and that 13,000 metric tons of grain had been destroyed.
Grain facilities in the Odesa region on the Black Sea also came under fire in the eighth wave of attacks on Ukrainian port infrastructure since Russia quit a UN-brokered deal last month that had allowed Kyiv to ship its grain via the Black Sea.
The Danube River has become Ukraine's main route for exporting grain since the collapse of the deal, which was meant to help tackle a global food crisis, and Izmail is Ukraine's main inland port across the Danube from Romania.
Kubrakov said the grain that was destroyed had been destined for Egypt and Romania, and that a total of 270,000 tons of grain had now been destroyed in attacks since Russia quit the Black Sea grain deal.
And he predicts more price increases are coming for retail pork because of California’s Proposition 12 which went into effect July 1.
CoBank said other factors are soft consumer demand for pork and "a murky outlook for U.S. pork exports.”
Massachusetts is also set to implement strict animal welfare rules.
Challenges to both state measures currently are being considered by Congress, with representatives battling over legislative efforts to overturn Prop 12 through the proposed Exposing Agricultural Trade Suppression (EATS) Act.
Attorneys general from 16 U.S. states also are asking federal lawmakers to “fix” the California law, which voters approved in 2018.
But that’s far from all that should happen in the wake of the report from provincial auditor Bonnie Lysyk into how more than 7,400 acres was removed from the Greenbelt.
Under the traditions of parliamentary democracy, it’s the minister responsible for the scandal who should resign.
But in this case, Ontario Premier Doug Ford said “the buck stops with me” so he should resign.
And the land should be put back into the Greenbelt.
And the proposal to allow up to three severances from rural properties to allow houses to be built should be scrapped, Farmers don’t need a flood of complaints from wealthy city slickers building their dream homes in the country. Nor should that land be taken out of production.
There’s yet another issue here: Ontario Agriculture Minister Lisa Thompson.
She has been silent, or muzzled, on these major policy initiatives and scandals.
According to Lysyk’s report, staff at her ministry outlined the losses connected to the land taken out of the Greenbelt, including specialty crops and hundreds of acres of the top-ranked soils in the province.
If Thompson knew this, and failed to tell Ford, Clark and cabinet, she is direlect in her duty to Ontario’s agriculture community.
Mark Reeser, vice-president of the Ontario Federation of Agriculture, has said in a radio interview, that he has lost trust in the Ford government.
That should obviously include Thompson.
Until now, she has had an outstanding record as a well-informed, hard-working minister of agriculture. She needs to retain that status by resigning as a matter of principle.
China is anticipated to increase pork imports by eight per cent next year, said the Foreign Agriculture Service of the United States Department of Agriculture.
But that is still half as much as 2020.
Swine production in China, and the resulting pork products, both are forecast to decline by one per cent in 2024, while live pig imports next year are forecast to grow 20 per cent to 6,000 head in 2024 as the country continues to rebuild its hog herd.
While hog imports are increasing, they are still at historic lows.
China’s production has struggled with low prices for hogs and pork and losses across the industry. Last year many companies were forced to sell their herds and some smaller producers sold in a hurry on their way out of the market altogether.
A group of 32 investors managing $7.3 trillion in assets is lobbying the G20 group of wealthier countries to align agricultural subsidies with their climate and nature goals by the end of the decade.
For Canada, the largest subsidy is supply management for dairy and poultry farmers.
The group, which includes Britain's biggest asset manager Legal & General Investment Managers and the fund arm of BNP Paribas, issued their first ever call to the countries' finance chiefs ahead of a G20 summit in September in India.
The intervention marks the first time investors have grouped together to tackle global subsidies in this way, they said, and follows a narrower 2021 request to the European Union, amid concern about the risks to investment portfolios of inaction.
A 2021 United Nations report said about 87 per cent of the $540 billion in total annual subsidies to agricultural producers included measures that were price distorting and potentially harmful to nature and human health.
In addition, subsidies caused $4-$6 trillion in damage to nature each year, a landmark 2021 UK report on the economics of biodiversity said.
While a global deal to preserve biodiversity, including reform of subsidies, was struck in December in Montreal, it was crucial that richer countries acted quickly, said Helena Wright, policy director at the FAIRR Initiative, a grouping of investors managing $70 trillion focused on farming issues.
"Investors are calling on the G20 to lead by example and ensure these commitments are met – to the benefit of the climate and nature."
The World Trade Organization has been trying for decades to reduce farm subsidies because they distort production and trade. Those efforts have largely failed since the Uruguay Round was signed in April, 1994.
Its main achievement was converting subsidies and trade barriers into tariffs, hoping that it would be simpler to make further cuts in the future. That has not happened.