Quebec Agriculture Minister Laurent Lessard has called a meeting for next week with representatives of the province’s pork processors and hog producers to find out their next move, after talks toward a revival for the battered sector went bust.
Lessard, in a news release Friday, said he was strongly disappointed that talks led by his appointed negotiator, civil servant Guy Coulombe, ended last week with no agreement on the future of the sector.
Coulombe had been appointed in September to mediate talks between the two groups and file a report to Lessard by March 3. That the talks failed was not Coulombe’s fault, Lessard said.
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Rather, it’s that the two groups “do not speak the same language,” Lessard said, and he had expected the two parties to put aside their differences in opinions and interests to find possible solutions that would deal with the industry’s “structural” problems.
A crisis situation calls for “courageous” decisions, Lessard said. Quebec’s pork sector has been battered in recent years by the rising Canadian dollar, escalating feed costs and low returns for hogs, as well as disease issues that swept through herds of weanlings between 2004 and 2006.
The province in December announced a $17.5 million aid package for farms where herds were hit by post-weaning multisystemic wasting syndrome (PMWS).
