It won’t happen overnight, but Alberta Pork is looking beyond the current crisis and embarking on a long-term strategy to re-energize the hog industry.
“As a board, we would like to see ourselves in a position better than we are at now, but we still believe that we’ve done everything that we could,” said Herman Simons, chairman of Alberta Pork. Speaking at one of a series of district meetings here, Simons said Alberta Pork board started to assess its situation in March 2008, and began developing a strategic plan in June 2008. He said the plan involves a great deal of marketing research development, branding, and a marketing pilot project. The current focus is on developing an Alberta Quality Platform.
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Alberta Pork has also hired consultants who will focus on the development of branding and differentiated branding in order to promote its product.
“We need to understand the possibility to differentiate before we can move forward. We need to understand what is going on and if there’s an opportunity and what we need to do to follow that,” said Simons.
Another one of Alberta Pork’s goals is to look at its investment strategies. “It’s been said by multiple people that we need to do things differently if we want to be in the business 10 to 15 years from now. It’s been said a lot of times, but it just hasn’t moved forward yet,” Simons said.
The upcoming focus will include working with market partners to be more efficient and to tap into a market that is willing to pay more for an Alberta pork product. “I know from different discussions with people who are not related to our market, but have international experience and expertise, that western Canadian pork is a product that is easily differentiable. It’s a different product and a quality product that can stand on its own two legs and we can demand a premium for it,” said Simons.
EVERYONE INVOLVED
The challenge will require producers to work with everyone in the production chain, which will require a change in understanding and relationships. The objective is to reduce the dependence on the commodity market and shift towards value-added, even though pork producers will always have some sort of relationship with the commodity market.
“We must embrace the necessary changes, embrace the difficult challenges and forge ahead,” Simons said, adding that the process of change will take 10 to 15 years.
Simons updated producers on the current industry situation, including the decline in the hog inventory, lower exports especially to the U.S., and a strong loonie.
“This year, the dollar has gone into a better relationship with the U.S. dollar and we have regained some of that export position which is encouraging,” he said. “It’s good that we can still compete with the international market.”
Simons said another concern is the increase in import numbers into Canada’s domestic market, said Simons. “We continue to lose in our local market and the U.S. is the prime reason for that,” he said.
Price projections over the next year are not very encouraging and H1N1 had a definite effect on pork market prices, said Simons. “After April 24, the normal relationship between pork prices from month to month was gone,” said Simons. “H1N1 had a huge impact on our price and as producers, we all know that.”
