Farmscape for September 27, 2007  (Episode 2600)

Pork producers on four continents are appealing to their supply chain partners to do everything they can as quickly as possible to increase prices paid to pork producers.

A joint statement issued by pork producer organizations in Canada, Britain, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands, and France calls for immediate action to increase wholesale and retail pork prices and returns to producers to offset rising production costs.

The statement was released following the 4th International Meat Secretariat World Pork Conference in Nanjing, China.

Canadian Pork Council president Clare Schlegel says Canadian delegates were surprised to learn the difficulties they are facing are not unique.

Clip-Clare Schlegel-Canadian Pork Council 

We learned that many other pig producers in other countries are struggling similar to what we are in Canada.

In many countries we're looking at losses of in excess of 30 dollars a pig.

Certainly producers in the United States have faired reasonably well over the last number of years and that's really a function of a low U.S. currency relative to Brazil, relative to Europe, relative to Canada and relative to Australia.

Currently in China the producers are doing reasonably well as well but those of us in Europe, those of us in Canada, those of us in South America and even in South Africa are struggling and so we decided to issue a joint statement pleading with our supply chain partners to find some way to increase the price of pork because we do believe supply and demand will work but we're fearful that if the full cycle happens that the supply worldwide is going to go down very quickly and then the rebound in prices is going to be very high and that's not what consumers want and it's going to create tremendous hurt among our pig producer people from around the world.

Producers are calling on consumers, the food service sector and retailers to provide support to increase prices now to avoid significant drops in production worldwide due to producers exiting the industry, which would trigger dramatic increases in wholesale and retail prices.

For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork Council