Tuesday, October 27, 2020

Chicken pricing negotiations fail

Ontario’s chicken marketing board and processors have failed to reach agreement on a new chicken pricing formula, leaving it to the Ontario Farm Products Marketing Commission to impose a solution.

The commission said on its website today that the producers and processors reached agreement on about 75 per cent of the issues, but continue to disagree on the rest.


In January, 2015, the commission imposed a pricing formula that included reductions for volume efficiencies. Ontario’s production has steadily increased.


The volume-related price reductions were applied annually.


In its website statement, the commission said it “is considering changes to all components of the current formula, including the items, values and designation in Table 1, and the potential elimination of annual adjustments.”


Earlier in the negotiations, the processors pressured the Ontario Broiler Chick and Hatching Egg Commission to reduce its labour component in its new cost-of-production formula.


The chicken board passes on cost increases for poults via its cost-of-production formula which is chick costs plus feed costs plus a margin for producers minus the volume-efficiency adjustment.