Formal adoption of Chicken farmers' new national allocation system in the works

Thursday, May 21, 2015

by SUSAN MANN

Next week, Chicken Farmers of Canada will start to ask provincial supervisory bodies to sign an amended operating agreement that includes the formal paperwork for a new national allocation system.

While the system has been in use since last year, it has generated concern among processors in Western Canada who say it favours Central Canada over the needs of the West.

Those concerns appear to be resolving. Mike Dungate, executive director of Chicken Farmers of Canada, says processors in Saskatchewan have dropped an appeal of an industry memorandum of understanding that activated the system. He says he thinks processors in all the western provinces are counting on the supervisory bodies in their provinces to address their concerns.

The new national chicken allocation system was approved last year by Chicken Farmers of Canada and began to be used for setting the amount of chicken each province can produce starting late last year. As part of the new system, 45 per cent of future growth is allocated based on provincial market shares, while 55 per cent is allocated based on several comparative advantage factors, such as population growth, gross domestic product growth, consumer price and farm input price indices. Previously, each province’s allocation was mainly based on its historical market share.

Chicken Farmers of Canada amended the operating agreement, called Schedule B of the Federal Provincial Agreement for Chicken, to reflect the memorandum of understanding on allocation signed in November 2014. Chicken Farmers and all 10 provincial chicken board have now approved the operating agreement amendment through a special vote, says Mike Dungate, executive director of Chicken Farmers of Canada.

Chicken Farmers and the provincial boards now need to formally sign the amended operating agreement as do all of the provincial supervisory bodies.  

Ontario’s supervisory body governing regulated marketing in the province is the Ontario Farm Products Marketing Commission.

Dungate says Chicken Farmers wants the operating agreement to be signed by the end of June before the board sets the allocations for the A-133 (Oct. 4 to Nov. 28) and A-134 (Nov. 29 to Jan. 23, 2016) quota periods. Those allocations are scheduled to be set at the July 6 Chicken Farmers board meeting.

If the agreement isn’t signed by the end of June, Dungate says “we keep pushing ahead” to get it signed. BF