Ontario considers funding sow cull meat donations to food banks

Thursday, June 5, 2008

by BETTER FARMING STAFF

“We are working with OIMP (Ontario Independent Meat Processors), Ontario Pork and the Ontario Food Banks Association; and we’ve been working with them for a while,” says Kelly Synnott, a spokesperson for Ontario Minister of Agriculture Leona Dombrowsky. “They came to us with a request when the federal (sow cull) program was first announced about whether or not we could do a program that would get this protein into food banks.”

However, before the province committed funds for the endeavour, “we wanted to know how much money they thought this was going to cost,” she says.
 
For this reason, Synnott explains, Minister Dombrowsky held off announcing the funding until Friday May 30 – well after the second phase of the cull program application process had closed: “We couldn’t have just come out of the gates right away without knowing how much it was going to cost and what our capacity was.”

Dombrowsky confirmed the commitment following a meeting with her federal and provincial counterparts last week. A news release will soon be issued outlining the details of the program, Synnott says.

Similar commitments from Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba were announced weeks ago. In Quebec, the provincial pork producers’ federation announced plans to cover the processing and distribution costs using a special fund earmarked to support food bank donations.

The cull, which is taking place across Canada, is intended to help stabilize the country’s hog producers struggling with market prices far below the costs of production and escalating input costs.

However, $50 million of federal funds slated for the program in February were intended only to cover costs of the cull – and not the additional costs of processing and delivering the meat to food banks, says Francois Bedard, a technical specialist with the Canadian Pork Council. The Council is responsible for approving program applications and distributing the money.

By mid-May, applications had been made to cull 42,700 sows in Ontario alone, just slightly over the province’s cap in the first stage of the program. The number includes the cull of animals that qualified retroactively before the program’s April launch. Ontario will cull 43 per cent of nearly 100,000 breeding animals listed in applications from across Canada, by far the largest share of the provinces.

Until  Sept. 1, the Canadian Pork Council (CPC), which administers the program, will consider applications from across Canada, regardless of province, to reach its goal of reducing the national herd by 10 per cent. BF