On a recent Thursday morning in Davidson, Sask., Rob Stone was steering his black half-ton GM pickup down the Ross Road toward town.
“Some days, you want to take the phone and just shut it off,” Stone said. “Maybe living in the dark wouldn’t be so bad.” For example, China’s ban on Canadian meat imports has reverberated so thoroughly and swiftly through Richard Davies’ pork operation that it’s too onerous and overwhelming to explain detail by detail.
The announcement in late June led to a flurry of conference calls between Olymel’s senior management and the man who runs their Beijing office: What had he heard? Why was this happening? And when would it come into effect? “The cycle doesn’t stop because some shipments have stopped,” Davies said. “You just can’t hit the brakes.”
“Snouts can go into a limited amount of markets. It could be Asian destinations, it could be Caribbean destinations, it could be, to a certain degree, even domestic destinations, but it’s still limited as far as markets that can take the snouts,” Davies said. “The ears can go to Asia as well. They can go domestically, typically for pet food items.”
A cruelty of the trade wars is that they have come during a year that should have been particularly lucrative for many Canadian farmers, especially for grain producers such as Stone. Soybean prices plunged from US$10.70 a bushel last year to USS$7.80 in May — the lowest level since 2008 — before recovering to US$8.75 a bushel.
For the first time, Bredin was forced to hire an additional series of smaller 25,000-tonne ocean-going vessels. That freight option was “more expensive, but was the only one available,” given the enormous demand, he said. “We weren’t the only ones who did that. Anyone shipping out of Ontario was doing the same thing. It was very good for Canada.”Ken Ball, senior commodities futures analyst, PI Financial Corp. The good times wouldn’t last.
Though agriculture has always been on the front lines of trade disputes, rarely has it been targeted with as much zeal as in the current battles between the U.S. and its trading partners, said Gary Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a non-profit think tank in Washington, D.C.
“That edict was very severe and I don’t think we’ve seen anything like it in the post-War period,” Hufbauer said. “This is a very, very unusual time.”
The handiwork of a right wing conservative. Funny that...
Where’s Trudeau and his job saving ways, I guess most farmers are not in Quebec.
Trudeau will probably just hand them a big check as usual
Half a million in equipment in the picture...