Organic producers fight for market independence
Tuesday, June 03, 2003
Jody Paterson
Times Colonist
I once ate a chicken so delicious that it was like eating a new kind of meat, firm and sweet and nothing at all like the hundreds of birds that had graced my table in the past.So I have just one word for the B.C. Supreme Court judge who fanned the fires of a provincial food war with his ruling last year that "a chicken is a chicken": Hah.
That court ruling has given B.C.'s chicken- and egg-marketing boards the ammunition they need to force the province's reluctant organic producers into their embrace. With the B.C. Marketing Board having since ruled in another case that "an egg is an egg" as well, organic chicken farmers -- like the one who raised that fine bird I dined on -- are now stuck with becoming part of the mainstream marketing system whether they like it or not.
They don't. Lower Mainland brothers Fred and Brad Reid have fought hard for five years to keep their respective organic egg and broiler-hen businesses out of the regulatory hands of the marketing boards, contending that a farmer who has chosen to raise his animals differently shouldn't have to pay marketing-board fees that ultimately subsidize conventional methods.
They want a new board created specifically for organics.
The Council of Organic Associations of B.C. has also argued vociferously against the forced merger, noting that differentiating between organic and conventional methods is the whole point of the industry. But the argument has so far won little support.
B.C.'s nine marketing boards are essentially cartels that stabilize meat, dairy, egg and vegetable markets by colluding on what prices to charge and how much "quota" to issue. No one can just decide one day to become a commercial farmer in B.C.; first, they'll have to hope there's surplus quota they can buy, and then they'll have to pay whatever the going price is as established by the applicable marketing board.
The actual market price of a live chicken in B.C. for farmers right now is under $5, explains Aldergrove farmer Brad Reid.
But under the quota system, the right to commercially raise that chicken is $30, and $80 if it's a laying hen. The market price of a dairy cow is about $1,500, but the quota price is almost $10,000.
Commercial farms above a certain size (100 hens or more, for instance, or 25 turkeys) are required by B.C. law to belong to a marketing board. Organic farms were the exception, however, as they were considered too small to bother with. The market share for organic producers in B.C. is less than two per cent.
But in 1999, the New Democrat government ended the long-standing practice of letting producers elect their marketing boards and instead switched to political appointments. Soon after, the new egg-marketing board made its first move, ordering Rabbit River Farm to sign up or see its flocks seized.
Consumers stopped that seizure, having been alerted to the farmer's predicament via notes tucked into every carton of organic eggs. Flooded with protest faxes, the Agriculture Ministry ordered the egg board to back off.
The industry is trying again with a letter last week to Premier Gordon Campbell warning of rising prices and volatile supplies if producers have to join marketing boards. In the meantime, however, producers have been ordered to pay quota prices for the animals they have on their farms (they'll have a few years to do it) and contribute to a subsidy fund that stabilizes prices in times of surplus.
What will it mean to consumers? Higher prices for organics, predicts the industry. Egg-marketing board official Peter Whitlock agrees, but says it will merely correct a price imbalance caused by organic farms operating outside of the system.
As for organic farmers' contention that they shouldn't have to subsidize animal-husbandry practices that they disagree with, Whitlock says giving into that would be like "letting people decide where their tax dollars are spent."
Interestingly enough, the B.C. Vegetable Commission has gone in the opposite direction, decreeing that organic vegetable producers -- with the exception of one organic potato grower who successfully fought for the right to be included -- will not be governed by marketing-board regulations.
The reason for the exclusion is simple enough, says commission general manager Murray Driediger. A tomato may be a tomato, he concedes, but there's still something very different about organics.
jpaterson@tc.canwest.com
© Copyright 2003 Times Colonist (Victoria)