The Stabilization Insurance program and the crisis in the pork industry

In the last few months, serious setbacks afflicting Quebec’s pork industry have been making headlines: the closing of slaughterhouses and processing plants, layoffs, and financial losses. A number of causes have been used to explain this crisis, in particular the rise of the Canadian dollar, industry cycles, high sickness levels, a lack of competitiveness among slaughterhouses, added costs to meet environmental standards, rigidities in collective marketing, and so on. A moratorium decreed by the provincial government on increases in pork production from 2002 to 2005 also stalled the rapid growth that the industry had experienced for more than a decade and stymied numerous investment projects.

Links of interest

Media Release: Already heavily subsidized – The Quebec pork industry needs a major overhaul