Alberta’s refundable national checkoff on beef cattle hasn’t had enough time to prove it can work, according to a group that led the charge for the refunds and opposes a new plan to end them.
The Western Stock Growers’ Association said in a release Thursday that it’s not in favour of an agreement early this month between Alberta Beef Producers (ABP) and Alberta Cattle Feeders Association (ACFA) which paves the way for the province to bring back a mandatory $1-per-head national checkoff on Alberta cattle.
The Alberta agriculture department, then led by George Groeneveld as ag minister, moved last year to make the checkoff refundable starting in April 2010.
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Since then, however, the Stelmach government brought in a new agriculture minister, Jack Hayden, who pledged to restore the non-refundable national checkoff, which funds national-level cattle research and marketing activities and agencies.
The $1-per-head national checkoff was a third of the $3 ABP checkoff, of which the remaining $2 would remain refundable.
In an editorial Monday, Alberta Farmer editor Will Verboven wrote that due to Alberta’s overwhelming share of the Canadian cattle industry, the province’s refundable national checkoff had put “virtually every cattle and beef marketing, advocacy, research and development program in the country… into a state of turmoil.”
“Leverage”
But the Calgary-based WSGA, which along with ACFA had originally pressed for the refundable checkoff, argues that if the refundable checkoff option is removed, “grassroots producers will lose the leverage necessary to help direct changes at the national level.”
“Programs like the refundable checkoff have the potential to help reform and build a stronger national organization for our producers over the next three years,” WSGA president Bill Hanson said in that group’s release Thursday.
“We cannot make a reversal to part of a program that has been given no opportunity to work.”
The WSGA said it looks on this potential change in policy, “which has happened within a six-month period, to be extremely detrimental to the positive, evolving governance solutions taking place on issues that have plagued our industry for the past 10 years.”
Hayden, who according to the WSGA had brokered this month’s ABP/ACFA deal, “has now driven a political wedge into the cattle industry, causing further discontent at a time when industry was starting to regain producer support,” the WSGA said.
However, Alberta Farmer’s Verboven noted Monday, checkoff refund figures show ABP can now expect a cut in funding of almost 50 per cent, and “will see its activities slashed by that much.”
The notion that “somehow all of this was supposed to lead to cattle industry unity has had the exact opposite effect,” he wrote. “Cow-calf producers and feedlot operators are now further apart than ever before.”
