Asparagus from Peru?

A disgruntled asparagus marketing board chairman, John Jaques from Thamesville, was quick to vent late March when horticulture was excluded from the $90 million that the province handed out to grain and oilseeds farmers. Less than a week later, Jaques' complaint took on new meaning.

In early April, Weil's Foods Processing Ltd. of Wheatley announced it won't pack asparagus this year. Jaques blames Weil's decision on a Nabisco plan to import asparagus from Peru. Jaques said Nabisco had co-packed with Weil's. With Nabisco bowing out, canning a crop this year wasn't worth Weil's efforts.

The Wheatley food company confirmed part of the story. "We made a decision not to can this year," says Mark Weil, who runs the operation with his brother. "I'm not going to get company specific...A general comment would be that imports are definitely the reason why we are not packing asparagus this year." Weil says the imports are entering Canada from both Peru and China.

Jaques predicts that the withdrawal of the canning industry will make it tough for fresh asparagus growers. While processed asparagus "wasn't a big percentage of the crop," canners put a floor price under the fresh market, Jaques says. "We've been scratching and clawing since free trade started. This will make it more difficult for us." He asserts that both Canadian and American governments have been helping Peru and China with technology transfer. Ironically, he thinks, those countries are now going to be putting Canadian growers out of business.

Jaques was only one of dozens of farm leaders at a reception at Ontario Ministry of Agriculture Food and Rural Affairs headquarters in late March bending the new minister's ear. The reception had already been planned in advance, then was postponed a couple of hours while Ontario agriculture minister Brian Coburn accompanied the Premier to Peterborough where Mike Harris announced $90 million for oilseed and grain producers. After the oilseed and grain announcement was made, Jaques accosted the minister, urging him to make some funding available for the horticultural industry, too. "I hate to see one group getting preference over another group," Jaques told Coburn.BF

Cure for low grain prices? Take a year off

That's the thinking behind the Focus on Sabbatical Inc., based in Ames, Iowa, and St. Marys, Ohio. The goal is to cut grain and oilseed production as much as 40 per cent in a single season, removing 4.5 billion bushels of feed grains, 1.5 billion bushels of oilseeds and two billion bushels of wheat from world markets.

Ames-based organizer Ken Goudy grew up in southern Ontario and has roots on the Canadian Prairies. Goudy says the program began 19 months ago in Saskatchewan, but organizers quickly realized that the Americans must be involved as well. Farmers are helpless in the marketplace, Goudy says. "The only solution is to grow more and that is the wrong solution. The rural economy is falling apart. Young people aren't coming back to the farm and that creates a huge problem."

The 'Sabbatical' focus is to grow less. "You can't manage it individually. You have to manage it cooperatively," Goudy says. The goal is to plan to do this three or four years in advance. If the commitments are made, the market will respond in advance, he says. "If you cut production significantly enough, you can drive the price a full year in advance," leaving farmers with enough income to carry them through the fallow year. "Speculators will buy and farmers will withhold selling."

One time membership in the organization is $250. Farmers would join an investment company with the authority and structure to tie them to leaving their land idle. Nor would they be allowed to grow an alternative crop and ruin someone else's market. "Every farm movement in the past has failed," says Goudy, noting that the idea falls apart because farmers failed to remain committed.

Goudy has a long career as an independent chemical dealer. He doesn't think that the farm chemical suppliers will oppose the sabbatical, even if their sales fall 40 per cent for that sabbatical year. "I believe the whole industry needs to be viable," Goudy says. "Putting agriculture more and more in an unviable situation isn't good for anyone."

Nor does Goudy think that up and coming producers such as Brazil and Argentina will simply fill the market void. Farmers there need to be brought into the scheme as well, he says. He talks to producers in South America who are hurting and he believes that they would also benefit from reducing acreage and getting a higher price for their crops.

"I understand the concept," says Kent County cash cropper Dennis Jack, chairman of the Ontario Corn Producers Association (OCPA). " More power to them if they can make it work."

Jack isn't waiting for that to happen. He talked to Better Farming after getting off the phone from a 90-minute conference call with the OCPA board planning a market revenue program "with a cost of production program in it." Jack says the OCPA has a mandate to send a rough version of the program to provincial agriculture minister Brian Coburn by some time in June, with the details finalized by the fall.

BSE spin doctors come to Canada

Montreal will be the Canadian headquarters for a global group responding to clients concerns about so-called mad cow disease (BSE) and other food safety issues. The company is Hill and Knowlton Canada, "the nation's leading strategic communications consultancy, specializing in public affairs, technology communications, health care/corporate/internet/consumer/marketing communications, life sciences communications, financial and investor relations and shareholder response services," according to their press release.

Farmers will know Hill and Knowlton better as the public relations firm behind the highly successful Dairy Farmers of Canada march on Parliament Hill in 1992, in defense of supply management. Hill and Knowlton is known for its ability to open doors in both Washington and Ottawa.

"Hill and Knowlton's clients look to us for innovative, effective and timely solutions to difficult challenges," says Paul Taaffe, Hill and Knowlton's Worldwide President, in an announcement in March. "The launch of the BSE Global Resource Group gives them further assurance they're looking in the right place. We're one of only a handful of worldwide public relations agencies offering counsel in this area. Certainly no other agency can match our grasp of the issue and our global reach."

The "global reach" includes offices in Washington and also in Belgium. The "expertise" includes the services of Christina Kaul, a former senior advisor to European Commissioner Franz Fischler on BSE and food safety issues. She will work from Belgium.

Hill and Knowlton, while based on New York, has 70 offices in 33 countries and is part of WPP Group, one of the world's largest communications services groups providing services to local, multinational and global clients including more than 300 of the Fortune Global 500.

To move or not to move?

While the Ontario Federation of Agriculture (OFA) is considering joining the other farm groups in Guelph, its president warns that moving the province's largest farm organization to the hub of agriculture at Guelph is far from being a "done deal."

The move might not happen if it isn't economical, says OFA president Jack Wilkinson. Staff will prepare a report on those economics for the board of directors when they meet next in June. Wilkinson points out that the OFA is committed to five more years at its current leased space in Toronto and finding a sublease may be costly. Nor are there "many bargains" in Guelph office space, he says. Wilkinson says rooms at local hotels on Stone Road are at least as expensive as where OFA directors currently stay in Toronto.

Furthermore, the breadth of the OFA lobby is wider than that of other organizations, Wilkinson notes. While wheat, corn and soybean growers and even pork producer organizations might deal strictly with the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs on Stone Road, the OFA has a broader mandate to lobby the ministry of the Environment and also Natural Resources, which are headquartered in Toronto. Travel costs into that city may also keep the federation at its current Toronto location. BF

Last month, the Organic Consumers Association (OCA) and other anti-GMO organizations launched a protest against Starbucks coffee shops in Canada and the United States. The target: "genetically enhanced" foods.

The OCA, says its newsletter BioDemocracy News, is trying to link what it refers to as "global sweatshops" to the use of "genetically enhanced" foods and also to rBST in milk. With 3,300 shops worldwide and more than 2,500 in Canada and the United States, Starbucks is a target because of its spectacular success over the last 10 years. BioDemocracy News claims that Starbucks owns 20 per cent of the coffee shops in the United States and refers to this protest as "the largest coordinated protest against genetically-engineered foods as well as the largest protest against agricultural sweatshops in U.S. history."

The OCA doesn't mind playing fast and loose with facts. Its newsletter says Starbucks "stubbornly refuses to guarantee" that its products are free of milk made from cows treated with rBST (it calls that milk a "genetically engineered ingredient" which some critics take umbrage at) and says that rBST "is banned in every industrialized country in world except for the United States and Mexico," a statement that is also being questioned.

Gord Surgeoner, president of Ontario Agri-Food Technologies , points out there is no difference between milk from rBST treated cows and untreated cows. Health Canada didn't approve the product in 1999 for veterinary reasons, not because of human health concerns.

Monsanto's Posilac is the top veterinary drug in the United States and has been in widespread use for seven years, Surgeoner says. "Everybody's drinking the milk and nobody is having a problem as far as I know." The product is used in 30 countries.

Keeping genetically modified food products out of the Starbuck's system would be very difficult, Surgeoner says. "You'd have to put up some pretty complicated supply chains."

McDonald's acknowledges "mad cow" fears

"We are asking our suppliers to comply with the existing rules," says Ron Usborne, vice-president of technical services, Caravelle Foods, exclusive supplier of hamburger patties to the fast-food giant's Canadian restaurants. He predicts that other meat companies will make the same request of their suppliers, if they haven't already.

The federal government banned the feeding of mammalian-based meat and bone meal to mammals in 1997. Last December, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) also banned the importation of bone and meat meal from any source.

The beef industry came under heavy media scrutiny last winter this winter after a few pens of cattle at a Texas feedlot were accidentally fed a truckload of feed containing meat and bone meal intended for a poultry farm. The United States has the same meat and bone meal ban as Canada.

Usborne says two Caravelle plants, one in Brampton and the other in Edmonton, supply more than half a billion patties annually to McDonald's restaurants in Canada. Most of the beef that goes into McDonald's hamburgers is made from lean cull cows, but there are also trimmings from so-called "fed cattle" -- steers and heifers raised in feedlots -- to increase the flavour.

The purpose in asking suppliers for the letter is twofold, Usborne says. The first reason is to reinforce the "firewalls" already in place to prevent a BSE outbreak in Canada. The second is to make sure that everyone in the industry is aware that there are rules in place to prevent an outbreak from occurring.

It is to everyone's advantage to reduce the risk of BSE contaminating the food supply, Usborne says. "If we have a problem in Canada, it won't be Caravelle Foods or McDonald's" that suffers, he says. "It will be the beef industry."

The BSE travails in Europe are certainly high in the minds of Canadians. In March, The Globe and Mail and CTV jointly published a poll conducted by the Ipsos Reid firm which revealed that nearly 60 per cent of those polled thought that someone in Canada "will become infected with the human form of mad-cow disease." The good news is that just over three-quarters trusted the CFIA to protect them against such food-borne illnesses.

Keeping out foot-and-mouth

Along with common sense biosecurity precautions like restricting introduction of new animals from herds of unknown health status and blocking farm access for trucks that are not empty and clean. Producers are urged to avoid having European visitors on the farm. There is also a warning about using food from food services as animal feed.

"If you notice any signs of the illness in your swine herd, contact your veterinarian and/or notify the local office of the CFIA," the advisory urges. So Better Farming did contact CFIA to see if the agency had any new procedures in place.

A CFIA spokesman says airport sniffer dogs normally used for random checks on travellers who might be carrying illegal meat are now used on almost all passengers from Europe.

Previous issues of Better Farming have reported on the case of former diplomat Graham N. Green who openly boasted in his Ottawa Citizen column about how he used diplomatic immunity to smuggle sausage into Canada and the United States. Are there any new measures to deal with diplomats like Green?

"Regarding diplomats, not that I am aware of," says CFIA media relations officer Patrick Charette.

First step to chicken contracts?

This week a hearing will wind up before the Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs Appeal Tribunal. Ultimately the four members of the tribunal will decide how much chicken the province's farmers will produce, and how it will be allocated to processing plants.

The CFO is appealing an order issued in December 1999 by the Farm Products Marketing Commission

, another branch of the provincial government, ordering the CFO to hand over authority to determine the amount of chicken produced in the province to the processors. Rather than basing production on how much chicken the market can handle, the commission sees the chicken board becoming an order taker for the processors. Chicken producers have said this will be the first step towards American-style contract growing. The way that chicken is priced is also likely to be changed.

This is a fundamental change in the powers of the chicken board, says Roy Maxwell, CFO's head of communications. The chicken marketing board has always had the authority to decide how much chicken will be produced in the province, says Maxwell. If the board becomes a mere order taker for the processors, some people will argue that chicken is no longer under supply management. Ironically, the tribunal is taking longer to hear the CFO's appeal than the commission took to hold its hearings back in September 1999.

The CFO's track record in opposing the commission's order to the Tribunal has not been positive thus far. At a preliminary hearing last fall, before a single member, Andrew Wright, a tribunal vice-chairman, the CFO's complaints were rejected. The CFO had argued that the commission had overstepped its jurisdictional boundaries in making its report, that there was bias by the commission, and also that notice of the hearing had been unfair. BF