The chair of Alberta Pork says, while it was too late for many, the turn around in live hog prices that occurred in 2014 came just in time to avert disaster within the Canadian pork industry.
An industry round table discussion of "Challenges and Opportunities for the Western Canadian Hog Industry" will highlight the 2014 Saskatchewan Pork Industry Symposium next month in Saskatoon.
Alberta Pork chair Frank Novak, who will be joined on the panel by his Alberta and Saskatchewan counterparts, says the competitive pressures pork producers have had will not go away but things are looking better than they have for quite some time.
"Our industry has finally seen a better year in 2014 than what we've had for several years before and so we hope that some of the drivers of that better return year will stick around for awhile.
We think there's opportunities both in terms of international markets and international demand that should help carry our market for awhile and things seem to have normalized on the feed side as well in the grain industry in terms of cost.
While I don't think it'll ever return to the really old days of super cheap grain it's certainly much easier to feed our animals now than it was two years ago.
I think if it had come any later it would have been disastrous for our industry.
As it was the good times returned too late for a lot of people obviously and we've lost, depending on the province, probably 25 to 35% of our industry.
If it had come much later I think that you would have seen another whole wave of people leaving the industry, mostly not voluntarily I would think."
Novak says international trade is both a source of great opportunity and a source of risk.
He says U.S. Country of Origin Labelling and the Russian situation are examples of the down side but on the up side we're hoping things like the South Korean agreement and the agreement with the European Union will give us opportunities down the road, although we probably won't see those benefits for a few years to come.
Source: AlbertaPork