Beyond Olymel’s dubious justifications for closing a third plant (inflation, plant obsolescence, lack of labor and, above all, the fall in foreign markets, particularly the Chinese market) and the layoff of nearly 1,000 workers, this time in Vallée-Jonction, in a region where it is the main source of income, beyond the savagery of this company, supposedly a cooperative of producers, in fact of integrators, who did not even deign to inform the workers concerned, what this saga of setbacks at Olymel brings to light is what I call the swine error, the beginning of which dates back to the time of the first free trade agreements in the early 1990s.
I was one of the first to lead what we called “the war of the pigs”. The new president of the Union des producteurs agricole (UPA) at the time, Laurent Pellerin, himself a pork producer, succeeding Jacques Proulx, promoted the shift proposed by the Liberal government of the day towards this what was then called “the conquest of markets” and the choice of export rather than food self-sufficiency, long favored by Jean Garon.
And pork production, being of good quality and not being under supply management, was to become the spearhead of this export policy. In a few years, we have reached more than nine million pigs per year, including seven million exported to the United States, China, Russia, Japan, etc. These markets today are closing one after the other.
But, above all, these intensive pig farms in confinement introduced an agricultural model that quickly destroyed our model of diversified local agriculture: the integration and export model. Pig farmers will quickly become simple “pig keepers” on contract for integrators who own the pigs, the feed mills to feed them and the slaughterhouses to process and market them.
These integrators were gradually bought by Olymel, now the largest integrator, almost a monopoly. The paradox, or rather the scandal, is significant: a cooperative of producers now submits the majority of pig farmers to its fixed integration scheme, in which they are reduced to the status of “serfs”, and today dismisses them today without even telling them.
This system has destroyed Quebec agriculture and delivered it hand and foot to a handful of integrator-exporters
Add to the picture the fact that the Ministry of the Environment hastened to authorize the liquid management of manure, to facilitate breeding on cement grids, with the result that pig manure, high in phosphorus, quickly caused eutrophication of practically all watercourses in the regions concerned.
And to top it off, it is these same integrators (mainly Olymel), as owners of the animals, and not the breeders, who collect most of the 400 million on average paid out by the farm income stabilization insurance, paid to both by the government, to fill the gap between (inflated) production prices and the prices obtained on the market. An incestuous scam.
This system destroyed Quebec agriculture and handed it over hand and foot to a handful of integrator-exporters. Because these pigs have to be fed. And by the same token, our grasslands and diverse fields have been transformed into toxic deserts of GMO corn and soybeans, where the soils are now virtually dead.
With such a record, there is nothing to mourn the decline of this industry, if not its consequences, which have not finished affecting our agriculture and the thousands of workers who have been enslaved and destroyed. in these brutalizing pigsties and slaughterhouses. The transition is likely to be long, painful and costly.