After perusal by the zone reps of BIG C and the okay from loophole the lawyer, Cam's letter calling for the resignation of Hughy is now public. No misconceptions about any stepping down, but hoping it raises a few eyebrows and causes some stir. I'm also trying to get my hands on an electronic version of the Cull Cow report and will post it as soon as I have it.
Randy
Hugh Lynch Staunton
President
Canadian Cattlemen's Association
Dear Hugh,
In May of 2004 I released a controversial paper entitled Behind the Veil of Science describing my opinions as to the state of the Canadian cattle industry both prior to and post May 20, 2003. As I recall, your reaction to that essay was an indignant, "how dare you blind-side industry leadership with such slander". In order not to be accused of "blind-siding" you, I am informing you in a very public and transparent way of the release of another compilation of my opinions. I wrote this last paper, "The Trickle-Down Illusion" in May 06, but until now have not churned it out in earnest.
I am writing this letter to you with two hats on, so to speak. First, I am expressing my opinions as one of Canada's frustrated and seemingly hopeless primary agriculture producers, and secondly as President of Beef Initiative Group - Canada. Possibly, Hugh, if we lived across the fence from one another with no beef industry issues between us, we could be better neighbors, but such is not the case and spades always must be called spades in my world. I suppose that the September announcement of Korea's intent to allow US beef past their border to the exclusion of any Canadian product and the Korean dictate of no Canadian beef to be processed in plants shipping product to them may have been the catalyst. As well the latest announcement of Mexico's intent to import dairy replacement stock, but the US refusal to trans ship Cdn animals across US soil exempts Canada once again from entering that market either.These are just the latest demonstrations in a long list, of Canadian producers being held subservient to the U.S. by a lack of courage on the part of Canadian industry and political leadership to set policy and pave the way for honest to God change in the way the Canadian Beef industry conducts it's affairs.
I'll not waste time ranting in this letter about the changes required, read the enclosed attachments or better yet, refer to our website www.beef-initiative-group.com. We fully recognize the need to resume trade with the US, as we allowed ourselves to become completely dependant on that country in the past ten years. Where industry leadership gets a failing grade is in its refusal to embrace any ideas for the kind of long term change this Canadian industry urgently requires. The U.S. can well afford to satisfy the packing industries refusal to BSE test, for they do not depend on an export market to survive, as has been proven by historic high prices both on live cattle and processed beef in that country for the past three years. The lack of courage to take Canada down it's own road, so to speak, has meant that we remain subservient to the U.S. and still must sell sixty percent of our production; a task made that much more onerous by an unwillingness on the part of industry leadership to embrace the tools and policies required to enter the very markets we court. As your introduction as the Canadian Cattlemen's Association (CCA) President, you pointed to a business degree on your resume. When you were studying for your business degree, was any mention made of the golden rule that "the customer is always right"? Can we not use our imaginations enough to find a solution to our three and a half years of BSE lessons other than being obedient to the controlling powers that set us up for this debacle? One cannot argue with statistics, and there are reams of stats to prove that we were failing at the producer level for years prior to May 2003.
It baffles most of us languishing in this Canadian captive market of beef that under your watch we continue to defy and break most of the golden rules of business. We continue to have most of our export eggs in one basket, the price we pay, I believe, for your steadfast refusal to lobby for BSE testing to satisfy the various markets we court. Under your watch, both as vice President and now as President of CCA, we continue to hear only silence on the subject of Cargill's acquisition of better beef in Ontario, giving them ownership of over fifty percent of fed cattle slaughter capacity in Canada. Their market share of slaughter capacity at home in the U.S. is around thirteen percent. You will remind me that the competition bureau gave the nod on that acquisition. I will remind you that Beef Initiative Group was awarded three and one half hours with the competition board also on their cross country tour investigating Cargill's takeover of Better Beef. What we learned in that discussion was that the competition board was not allowed to investigate whether the takeover would prevent future competition in the way of genuine Canadian owned slaughter capacity from developing. They were only allowed to determine if Cargill would have an unfair competitive advantage east to west. With a few hundred miles of great Canadian Shield dipping down between Manitoba and Ontario, the answer to both questions was easy. The CCA failed as an organization to make any effort to curtail the power of one of the main players who've held us hostage and ****d the industry for over three years. To the contrary, CCA's website stated after the announcement "this is good news, it shows Cargill's faith in the Canadian cattle industry." Some of us thought it showed Cargill thumbing their nose at Canadian government and Canadian producers by further concentrating their control over the Canadian industry. I think the jury's in on that debate.
You've stated on different occasions that you believe it better to approach Canada's beef trade issues walking softly and "harmonizing" the North American market. Seems an appropriate time to point out that a fair bit of conflict of interest exists within CCA. You have on board a director from Alberta who is a veterinarian and who also operates a large scale feedlot animal health consultant business. Last year, if memory serves me, he was at the forefront of a push to eliminate the "own use import" policy for generic Ivermectin. I suspect his firm sells a sizeable share of the brand name product here in Canada, thus it seems he should have excused himself from that debate. In the interest of harmonizing, one would think that our national organization would be promoting any opportunity to be cost comparative with US producers. On that subject, I recall in the early seventies Charlie Gracey going to bat for Canadian cattle feeders when Stilbesterol was banned in Canada by European trade action but not in the US. His reaction to that was to insist that if Canadian producers were not allowed use of the product, then the Canadian Government must insist that any beef imported from the U.S. be proven not to have been fed the product either. In short order the product was banned on both sides of the 49th parallel. Seems to me that Dennis Laycraft failed to come to bat for us in this more recent case. Years past, we had a CCA that actually fought for the producer that financed the organization, rather than allowing the interests of a few, or worse yet the dictates of the U.S. and the U.S. packer to set policy for whatever remains of the Canadian beef industry. We now appear to have an Executive Vice President in charge of an extremely weak board; and so it seems, the tail wags the dog.
I fear we have for too long allowed industry to mistake one of the world's largest economies as "the world's most lucrative market". Seems anyone should be able to analyze the last dozen years data on declining farm gate profit margins and conclude that the way agriculture business has been conducted in recent years has sent the family operations in Canadian agriculture spiraling down. All levels of agriculture industry and political leadership seem to have exempted themselves from having to deal with this thorny issue by clinging to the belief that the "trickle down concept" will be our salvation, and, it would appear that you include yourself in this group. The concentrated control that agriculture related corporations exert over the primary producer, both on input costs and on the sale of our production, has proven time and again to the detriment of us producing the goods, yet you continue to cram that "harmonizing the North American market" line at us. How can industry leaders justify continuing to force producers to increase production in order to compensate for shrinking profit margins, this at a time when our market is held captive on our own soil, and we're not allowed the use of the tools necessary to rectify the situation? I submit to you that we are held back in this country more so by domestic policy and lack of courage than by all of the WTO grievances ballyhooed. Agriculture leadership in Canada is almost comparable to Neville Chamberlain repeatedly flying off for tea with the enemy in 1937, all the while allowing them to snow him with bullshit. It bit Chamberlain in the ass in the end and the jury is now in on Canada's relationship with Uncle Sam in every industry we trade in. Should we mention softwood, energy, wheat, pork, steel?
For some time now, we've been led to believe that our "Age Verification Program" was the be-all to end-all. I agree; it has the appearance of being a very good thing for Canadian Producers. The "but" in this is that it will only benefit the primary producers if those same producers are convinced to take advantage of the program and finish, process, and market their own beef to global customers. What good is there in little Doug Horner's drive to make age verification mandatory? What good is there in creating one more market for the three packers who've ****d us when the primary producer is held captive by the oligopoly that exists, forcing them to surrender live on the hoof at less than breakeven prices? When all calves are packing an age tag, there is no competition at ringside to cause Cargill and Tyson to bid harder to own them. Clearly, all profits from age verification will benefit those selling beef. The feedlot operator may recognize a twenty or thirty dollar per head premium, barely covering his added handling and sorting costs. I'll wager the producer who bought and installed the tags and administered the program at the grass roots level won't see a cent for his efforts, unless he sells the product of his labors to the Japanese or some other foreign market by his own efforts. In the system we operate under, producers sell cattle, packers sell beef. Government and industry made huge political hay over our age verification system being state of the art in the world, putting us years ahead of other countries. Out of the blue came the US with their A40 bone ossification grading, so much for age verification trumping the need to BSE test. We were once again reminded of our place in the North American pecking order. We once again acted like a beaten old gelding and retreated.
Perhaps we need also to dredge up another bit of other history that has now bitten CCA in the ass, that being the way the national organization chose to deny the evidence back in 2001 of the potential for a BSE outbreak and the fact that rendering, while profitable to the packers, carried with it the perception in the rest of the world of sacrificing human safety. After watching Japan's political debacle in their BSE experience, perhaps CCA might have came to the conclusion that rendering should go the way of the Dodo bird. Once again, however, the American packing industry proved, as it's done for over a hundred years, that it's bigger than government or industry or presidential decrees or acts of congress. As long as there's a buck to be made from rendering, we're going to render, CCA and CFIA be damned, and damned you are.
On the subject of research done relating to the cattle industry, there exists a study commissioned by Alberta Beef Producers (ABP) entitled Economic Losses Associated With Cull Cows, completed by Plan 2000 Management Associates Ltd. And Informa Economics. This study was bought and paid for with at least some of our check-off dollars, yet at the time of this writing we have not been allowed to see it. The results of this study are to be another embarrassment to ABP and CCA. We wonder if that accounts for it being withheld from us. Would producers benefit from having access to this document? Do producers ultimately own this study? The findings in this study may enlighten a large percentage of Cdn cow - calf producers as to future impacts on their bottom line, yet since July 06 the information has remained shelved.
It is painfully obvious that there exists in Canada today, two types of beef producers. The primary producer at the bottom of the economic food chain, and only one link above him, the feedlot producer. [See "Lifting the Veil" 2005, www.beef-initiative-group.com] We operate under a system designed to pit one against the other, one marketing a very small number annually, the other operating on huge volume but with very skinny margins. There is simply not enough room left at the end of industry leadership discussion presently to include the primary producer in the conversation. He's been cast adrift and is on his own. The best illustration of this point that I can think of is a rather heated Ben Thorlakson in Red Deer in January, 2005 stating,
"Why would we worry about the primary producer when income from cow herds is at best a secondary and usually tertiary income for them, and they all have off-farm jobs to support themselves anyway. Most of them keep cow herds around to eat off sloughs and headlands that they can't farm".
The debt that cow herd has piled up for the primary producer and the fact that he or she has to take a second full time job is a symptom of the disease, not an acceptable out for industry leadership, but Ben Thorlakson certainly did tip his hand as to where leadership concerns truly lie.
As most of us see it, the kind of change we need leadership to promote is that kind of change that will integrate the Canadian producer into the value chain rather than to simply surrender our product live on the hoof and take whatever we're given. The beef industry suffers no legal barriers as exists within the grain industry, i.e., Wheat Board constraints, etc. It is but a matter of convincing industry leadership to discuss the merits of helping producers out of the hole on their own cognizance, rather than having to rely on government bail-outs. If as much energy had been spent exploring and establishing these ideas since Beef Initiative Group presented them two and a half years ago, we may now have the first producer owned slaughter plant up and running and selling Canadian BSE tested beef to any market in the world. Instead, we've sat and watched as Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Argentina and others have deftly and willingly filled the vacancies in Asian and Japanese markets left open to them by Americas' stubborn refusal to BSE test and Canada's obedient and subservient compliance when ordered not to test either. It is a bitter irony that beginning in 1982, New Zealand was probably worse off than we were three or four years ago, yet today they are one of our main competitors in the global beef trade. They became so because of the "Wilson budget" of 1982 which cast the agricultural sector adrift in terms of any further government subsidy, thus forcing producers to gel up and survive. They did so in the beef industry primarily by forming producer owned processing plants and aggressively marketing their product globally. Fortunately, they were not encumbered by dictates from "the world's most lucrative market". By no means am I naive enough to suggest that a similar transformation for the Canadian beef industry will be easy; rather, I believe that we have no choice. At this late date, perhaps it's too little too late and that may be the Lynch Staunton legacy.
I have said many times that Canada should not focus on going head to head against Cargill and Tyson, rather we should put our own boat in the water and create an alternate market for ten percent of our annual beef production, thus causing the Cargill's and Tyson's to bid harder on the remaining ninety percent of our annual production. This would, possibly for the first time, cause something that resembles honest to God competition and begin to crack the concentrated control that the multi-nationals currently have over us. For this to ever come to fruition we require the courage of industry leadership to help promote, and that is the key ingredient that we presently do not have. It seems a shame that the very national organization we finance through check-off dollars lacks the business savvy to help us to better ourselves.
As I write this, the combination of a high Canadian dollar and increasing feed grain prices coupled with the Korean announcement banning Canadian beef from North American imports, will likely amount to virtually every producer in this country being held hostage once again and forced to sell calves at far less than a breakeven in order to try and service mounting debt. Once again, seems like no-one should have to be reminded of the farcical stand Canada has taken.
We can no longer stand at the 49th parallel and beg Uncle Sam to take us back. Time is indeed a potent jury, and we have watched the clock tick for well over three years now. Unless one is foolhardy enough to subscribe to the "trickle down illusion" there is left to us no choice for survival at the family farm level than to drastically rethink the way we conduct ourselves as an industry, if we wish to be able to be called an industry. We will not survive at the family farm level by continuing to be forced to forfeit our production at a loss. Far better to fight and fail than continue to roll over. To date, we've not seen any fight or vision nor an original idea for change come from any of the provincial organizations nor the national cattle organization. It is impossible for any of us to know whether the lack of action from CCA for over three years has been the result of fear or simply because the situation overwhelmed the capabilities of those at the helm; it matters not. What is essential now, to salvage what's left, is the removal of the top end and a focused effort to work toward change.
I therefore, as president of Beef Initiative Group - Canada, publicly state my belief that for the good of whatever is salvageable to Cdn primary producers, there must be wholesale change in the leadership of CCA and massive policy change in how the Cdn industry promotes beef processing and sales. In conclusion, I believe before further financial damage can be inflicted on this countries beef producers, we need the resignation of Hugh Lynch - Staunton as president of CCA and the termination of Dennis Laycraft as executive vice president - CCA.Further to that happening, I believe we need to closely examine the performance at the director level of ABP, as that organization in essence carries a bigger stick than does CCA by virtue of the fact that forty percent of Canada's beef mother herd resides in Alberta, and over seventy percent of Canada's annual beef production is finished in Alberta. It is my firm belief, and time has proven this point, that the stand ABP has taken for three and a half years now mirrors that of CCA. Perhaps through concerted effort by producers and government involvement, this means dismantling the entire structure and rebuilding. It may be more graceful to resign than implode.
Sincerely,
Cam Ostercamp
President, Beef Initiative Group- Canada
Randy
Hugh Lynch Staunton
President
Canadian Cattlemen's Association
Dear Hugh,
In May of 2004 I released a controversial paper entitled Behind the Veil of Science describing my opinions as to the state of the Canadian cattle industry both prior to and post May 20, 2003. As I recall, your reaction to that essay was an indignant, "how dare you blind-side industry leadership with such slander". In order not to be accused of "blind-siding" you, I am informing you in a very public and transparent way of the release of another compilation of my opinions. I wrote this last paper, "The Trickle-Down Illusion" in May 06, but until now have not churned it out in earnest.
I am writing this letter to you with two hats on, so to speak. First, I am expressing my opinions as one of Canada's frustrated and seemingly hopeless primary agriculture producers, and secondly as President of Beef Initiative Group - Canada. Possibly, Hugh, if we lived across the fence from one another with no beef industry issues between us, we could be better neighbors, but such is not the case and spades always must be called spades in my world. I suppose that the September announcement of Korea's intent to allow US beef past their border to the exclusion of any Canadian product and the Korean dictate of no Canadian beef to be processed in plants shipping product to them may have been the catalyst. As well the latest announcement of Mexico's intent to import dairy replacement stock, but the US refusal to trans ship Cdn animals across US soil exempts Canada once again from entering that market either.These are just the latest demonstrations in a long list, of Canadian producers being held subservient to the U.S. by a lack of courage on the part of Canadian industry and political leadership to set policy and pave the way for honest to God change in the way the Canadian Beef industry conducts it's affairs.
I'll not waste time ranting in this letter about the changes required, read the enclosed attachments or better yet, refer to our website www.beef-initiative-group.com. We fully recognize the need to resume trade with the US, as we allowed ourselves to become completely dependant on that country in the past ten years. Where industry leadership gets a failing grade is in its refusal to embrace any ideas for the kind of long term change this Canadian industry urgently requires. The U.S. can well afford to satisfy the packing industries refusal to BSE test, for they do not depend on an export market to survive, as has been proven by historic high prices both on live cattle and processed beef in that country for the past three years. The lack of courage to take Canada down it's own road, so to speak, has meant that we remain subservient to the U.S. and still must sell sixty percent of our production; a task made that much more onerous by an unwillingness on the part of industry leadership to embrace the tools and policies required to enter the very markets we court. As your introduction as the Canadian Cattlemen's Association (CCA) President, you pointed to a business degree on your resume. When you were studying for your business degree, was any mention made of the golden rule that "the customer is always right"? Can we not use our imaginations enough to find a solution to our three and a half years of BSE lessons other than being obedient to the controlling powers that set us up for this debacle? One cannot argue with statistics, and there are reams of stats to prove that we were failing at the producer level for years prior to May 2003.
It baffles most of us languishing in this Canadian captive market of beef that under your watch we continue to defy and break most of the golden rules of business. We continue to have most of our export eggs in one basket, the price we pay, I believe, for your steadfast refusal to lobby for BSE testing to satisfy the various markets we court. Under your watch, both as vice President and now as President of CCA, we continue to hear only silence on the subject of Cargill's acquisition of better beef in Ontario, giving them ownership of over fifty percent of fed cattle slaughter capacity in Canada. Their market share of slaughter capacity at home in the U.S. is around thirteen percent. You will remind me that the competition bureau gave the nod on that acquisition. I will remind you that Beef Initiative Group was awarded three and one half hours with the competition board also on their cross country tour investigating Cargill's takeover of Better Beef. What we learned in that discussion was that the competition board was not allowed to investigate whether the takeover would prevent future competition in the way of genuine Canadian owned slaughter capacity from developing. They were only allowed to determine if Cargill would have an unfair competitive advantage east to west. With a few hundred miles of great Canadian Shield dipping down between Manitoba and Ontario, the answer to both questions was easy. The CCA failed as an organization to make any effort to curtail the power of one of the main players who've held us hostage and ****d the industry for over three years. To the contrary, CCA's website stated after the announcement "this is good news, it shows Cargill's faith in the Canadian cattle industry." Some of us thought it showed Cargill thumbing their nose at Canadian government and Canadian producers by further concentrating their control over the Canadian industry. I think the jury's in on that debate.
You've stated on different occasions that you believe it better to approach Canada's beef trade issues walking softly and "harmonizing" the North American market. Seems an appropriate time to point out that a fair bit of conflict of interest exists within CCA. You have on board a director from Alberta who is a veterinarian and who also operates a large scale feedlot animal health consultant business. Last year, if memory serves me, he was at the forefront of a push to eliminate the "own use import" policy for generic Ivermectin. I suspect his firm sells a sizeable share of the brand name product here in Canada, thus it seems he should have excused himself from that debate. In the interest of harmonizing, one would think that our national organization would be promoting any opportunity to be cost comparative with US producers. On that subject, I recall in the early seventies Charlie Gracey going to bat for Canadian cattle feeders when Stilbesterol was banned in Canada by European trade action but not in the US. His reaction to that was to insist that if Canadian producers were not allowed use of the product, then the Canadian Government must insist that any beef imported from the U.S. be proven not to have been fed the product either. In short order the product was banned on both sides of the 49th parallel. Seems to me that Dennis Laycraft failed to come to bat for us in this more recent case. Years past, we had a CCA that actually fought for the producer that financed the organization, rather than allowing the interests of a few, or worse yet the dictates of the U.S. and the U.S. packer to set policy for whatever remains of the Canadian beef industry. We now appear to have an Executive Vice President in charge of an extremely weak board; and so it seems, the tail wags the dog.
I fear we have for too long allowed industry to mistake one of the world's largest economies as "the world's most lucrative market". Seems anyone should be able to analyze the last dozen years data on declining farm gate profit margins and conclude that the way agriculture business has been conducted in recent years has sent the family operations in Canadian agriculture spiraling down. All levels of agriculture industry and political leadership seem to have exempted themselves from having to deal with this thorny issue by clinging to the belief that the "trickle down concept" will be our salvation, and, it would appear that you include yourself in this group. The concentrated control that agriculture related corporations exert over the primary producer, both on input costs and on the sale of our production, has proven time and again to the detriment of us producing the goods, yet you continue to cram that "harmonizing the North American market" line at us. How can industry leaders justify continuing to force producers to increase production in order to compensate for shrinking profit margins, this at a time when our market is held captive on our own soil, and we're not allowed the use of the tools necessary to rectify the situation? I submit to you that we are held back in this country more so by domestic policy and lack of courage than by all of the WTO grievances ballyhooed. Agriculture leadership in Canada is almost comparable to Neville Chamberlain repeatedly flying off for tea with the enemy in 1937, all the while allowing them to snow him with bullshit. It bit Chamberlain in the ass in the end and the jury is now in on Canada's relationship with Uncle Sam in every industry we trade in. Should we mention softwood, energy, wheat, pork, steel?
For some time now, we've been led to believe that our "Age Verification Program" was the be-all to end-all. I agree; it has the appearance of being a very good thing for Canadian Producers. The "but" in this is that it will only benefit the primary producers if those same producers are convinced to take advantage of the program and finish, process, and market their own beef to global customers. What good is there in little Doug Horner's drive to make age verification mandatory? What good is there in creating one more market for the three packers who've ****d us when the primary producer is held captive by the oligopoly that exists, forcing them to surrender live on the hoof at less than breakeven prices? When all calves are packing an age tag, there is no competition at ringside to cause Cargill and Tyson to bid harder to own them. Clearly, all profits from age verification will benefit those selling beef. The feedlot operator may recognize a twenty or thirty dollar per head premium, barely covering his added handling and sorting costs. I'll wager the producer who bought and installed the tags and administered the program at the grass roots level won't see a cent for his efforts, unless he sells the product of his labors to the Japanese or some other foreign market by his own efforts. In the system we operate under, producers sell cattle, packers sell beef. Government and industry made huge political hay over our age verification system being state of the art in the world, putting us years ahead of other countries. Out of the blue came the US with their A40 bone ossification grading, so much for age verification trumping the need to BSE test. We were once again reminded of our place in the North American pecking order. We once again acted like a beaten old gelding and retreated.
Perhaps we need also to dredge up another bit of other history that has now bitten CCA in the ass, that being the way the national organization chose to deny the evidence back in 2001 of the potential for a BSE outbreak and the fact that rendering, while profitable to the packers, carried with it the perception in the rest of the world of sacrificing human safety. After watching Japan's political debacle in their BSE experience, perhaps CCA might have came to the conclusion that rendering should go the way of the Dodo bird. Once again, however, the American packing industry proved, as it's done for over a hundred years, that it's bigger than government or industry or presidential decrees or acts of congress. As long as there's a buck to be made from rendering, we're going to render, CCA and CFIA be damned, and damned you are.
On the subject of research done relating to the cattle industry, there exists a study commissioned by Alberta Beef Producers (ABP) entitled Economic Losses Associated With Cull Cows, completed by Plan 2000 Management Associates Ltd. And Informa Economics. This study was bought and paid for with at least some of our check-off dollars, yet at the time of this writing we have not been allowed to see it. The results of this study are to be another embarrassment to ABP and CCA. We wonder if that accounts for it being withheld from us. Would producers benefit from having access to this document? Do producers ultimately own this study? The findings in this study may enlighten a large percentage of Cdn cow - calf producers as to future impacts on their bottom line, yet since July 06 the information has remained shelved.
It is painfully obvious that there exists in Canada today, two types of beef producers. The primary producer at the bottom of the economic food chain, and only one link above him, the feedlot producer. [See "Lifting the Veil" 2005, www.beef-initiative-group.com] We operate under a system designed to pit one against the other, one marketing a very small number annually, the other operating on huge volume but with very skinny margins. There is simply not enough room left at the end of industry leadership discussion presently to include the primary producer in the conversation. He's been cast adrift and is on his own. The best illustration of this point that I can think of is a rather heated Ben Thorlakson in Red Deer in January, 2005 stating,
"Why would we worry about the primary producer when income from cow herds is at best a secondary and usually tertiary income for them, and they all have off-farm jobs to support themselves anyway. Most of them keep cow herds around to eat off sloughs and headlands that they can't farm".
The debt that cow herd has piled up for the primary producer and the fact that he or she has to take a second full time job is a symptom of the disease, not an acceptable out for industry leadership, but Ben Thorlakson certainly did tip his hand as to where leadership concerns truly lie.
As most of us see it, the kind of change we need leadership to promote is that kind of change that will integrate the Canadian producer into the value chain rather than to simply surrender our product live on the hoof and take whatever we're given. The beef industry suffers no legal barriers as exists within the grain industry, i.e., Wheat Board constraints, etc. It is but a matter of convincing industry leadership to discuss the merits of helping producers out of the hole on their own cognizance, rather than having to rely on government bail-outs. If as much energy had been spent exploring and establishing these ideas since Beef Initiative Group presented them two and a half years ago, we may now have the first producer owned slaughter plant up and running and selling Canadian BSE tested beef to any market in the world. Instead, we've sat and watched as Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Argentina and others have deftly and willingly filled the vacancies in Asian and Japanese markets left open to them by Americas' stubborn refusal to BSE test and Canada's obedient and subservient compliance when ordered not to test either. It is a bitter irony that beginning in 1982, New Zealand was probably worse off than we were three or four years ago, yet today they are one of our main competitors in the global beef trade. They became so because of the "Wilson budget" of 1982 which cast the agricultural sector adrift in terms of any further government subsidy, thus forcing producers to gel up and survive. They did so in the beef industry primarily by forming producer owned processing plants and aggressively marketing their product globally. Fortunately, they were not encumbered by dictates from "the world's most lucrative market". By no means am I naive enough to suggest that a similar transformation for the Canadian beef industry will be easy; rather, I believe that we have no choice. At this late date, perhaps it's too little too late and that may be the Lynch Staunton legacy.
I have said many times that Canada should not focus on going head to head against Cargill and Tyson, rather we should put our own boat in the water and create an alternate market for ten percent of our annual beef production, thus causing the Cargill's and Tyson's to bid harder on the remaining ninety percent of our annual production. This would, possibly for the first time, cause something that resembles honest to God competition and begin to crack the concentrated control that the multi-nationals currently have over us. For this to ever come to fruition we require the courage of industry leadership to help promote, and that is the key ingredient that we presently do not have. It seems a shame that the very national organization we finance through check-off dollars lacks the business savvy to help us to better ourselves.
As I write this, the combination of a high Canadian dollar and increasing feed grain prices coupled with the Korean announcement banning Canadian beef from North American imports, will likely amount to virtually every producer in this country being held hostage once again and forced to sell calves at far less than a breakeven in order to try and service mounting debt. Once again, seems like no-one should have to be reminded of the farcical stand Canada has taken.
We can no longer stand at the 49th parallel and beg Uncle Sam to take us back. Time is indeed a potent jury, and we have watched the clock tick for well over three years now. Unless one is foolhardy enough to subscribe to the "trickle down illusion" there is left to us no choice for survival at the family farm level than to drastically rethink the way we conduct ourselves as an industry, if we wish to be able to be called an industry. We will not survive at the family farm level by continuing to be forced to forfeit our production at a loss. Far better to fight and fail than continue to roll over. To date, we've not seen any fight or vision nor an original idea for change come from any of the provincial organizations nor the national cattle organization. It is impossible for any of us to know whether the lack of action from CCA for over three years has been the result of fear or simply because the situation overwhelmed the capabilities of those at the helm; it matters not. What is essential now, to salvage what's left, is the removal of the top end and a focused effort to work toward change.
I therefore, as president of Beef Initiative Group - Canada, publicly state my belief that for the good of whatever is salvageable to Cdn primary producers, there must be wholesale change in the leadership of CCA and massive policy change in how the Cdn industry promotes beef processing and sales. In conclusion, I believe before further financial damage can be inflicted on this countries beef producers, we need the resignation of Hugh Lynch - Staunton as president of CCA and the termination of Dennis Laycraft as executive vice president - CCA.Further to that happening, I believe we need to closely examine the performance at the director level of ABP, as that organization in essence carries a bigger stick than does CCA by virtue of the fact that forty percent of Canada's beef mother herd resides in Alberta, and over seventy percent of Canada's annual beef production is finished in Alberta. It is my firm belief, and time has proven this point, that the stand ABP has taken for three and a half years now mirrors that of CCA. Perhaps through concerted effort by producers and government involvement, this means dismantling the entire structure and rebuilding. It may be more graceful to resign than implode.
Sincerely,
Cam Ostercamp
President, Beef Initiative Group- Canada
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