A group of Canadian swine producers is calling for a voluntary 10 percent cull of the North American swine herd to help reduce an over-supply of pork and restore profitability to the pork industry.
A group of 15 pork producers met in Tavistock, Ontario during the weekend to discuss the economic crisis facing their industry and identify possible solutions.
Within the next 45 to 90 days, most of those on hand at the meeting expect to be out of money and unable to pay bills.
Moncton, Ontario pork producer Mike Bosch says the North American pork supply is simply too high and the only potential solution, within that 45 to 90 day window, is to reduce supply.
We would hope every producer within North America would volunteer to eliminate one out of every ten pigs.
We’re at the very infant stages of this idea.
The main thing is to get the idea out there.
We have plans of meeting a couple of more times this week to look at what the next steps are.
We have some very key and connected industry people as well as producers that we feel we can maybe make contact with a lot of producers and a lot of the pigs throughout North America.
We think that we can maybe have some influence.
We’ll never get all the producers but we’re hoping that we can get a large amount of the producers to cooperate.
If it can’t be North America wide it’s not going to be effective.
If Ontario does it it won’t be effective.
The American pork will replace our meat on the grocery store shelves and visa versa.
If it just happens in the U.S. Canadian meat will flow down there and just fill their grocery store shelves so it needs to be a whole North American thing.
Like I said, it’s in the very infancy stages of development but we’re going to meet here two times this week and use our connections and see if we can move this thing forward.
Bosch says producers have to control what they can and supply is something they believe they can control.
He says the group hopes to have something organized within the next two to three weeks.
Source: Farmscape.Ca
