Hard-up orchardists ready to walk away

Ron Seymour 2010-03-21 Kelowna Daily Courier:
Cash-poor Okanagan orchardists are heading into the spring season in an anxious and angry mood, says the head of the B.C. Fruit Growers Association. Two years of dismal apple prices have left the industry reeling and prompted calls for $10 million in emergency financial assistance. Unless that aid is forthcoming, BCFGA president Joe Sardinha predicts many growers will simply abandon leased orchards this spring. “Growers are not very happy, and that‘s an understatement,” Sardinha said Saturday. “There‘s a lot of anxiety out there, because a lot of growers are really hurting financially. And there‘s a lot of anger, too.” That anger, Sardinha says, comes from a sense among growers that successive governments have failed to fulfil promises made to the farming community when the Agricultural Land Reserve was established in the early 1970s.

The reserve makes it difficult for orchardists to use their land for anything other than farming. In compensation, growers were promised a variety of income-support programs that Sardinha says have mostly faded away. “The ALR preserves green space and farmland, but what good is it if growers aren‘t even earning back their cost of production?” Sardinha said. It costs Okanagan growers an average of 22 cents to produce a pound of apples. However, the return in 2008 was just 16 cents, and prices for last year‘s crop dropped to 13 cents a pound. With losses piling up, BCFGA directors met with government officials last week in Victoria to ask for $10 million in immediate cash assistance. Sardinha said he hoped to get a response from Victoria within the next month on whether such aid will materialize. The BCFGA is seeking a further $7.5 million for “extraordinary” losses associated with a hard, early frost last October that affected 12 per cent of the Valley‘s apple crop. There is a federal-provincial program, known as AgriRecovery, that can provide compensation for losses associated with “special circumstances,” such as extreme weather events.

More generally, the BCFGA is also hoping the federal government will consider establishing a supply-management program for apples, which would set a minimum selling price for fruit being imported into Canada. Surplus apples from the United States and other countries are sometimes “dumped” into Canada at artificially low prices, the BCFGA says, and the effect is to also reduce prices paid to Canadian growers. “Growers are looking for a regulated price that would allow them to meet their cost of production and also have a profit margin,” Sardinha said. “We have to at least get a discussion going about these kind of things. Otherwise, the future for the industry is not very bright.”