If I go back to the graph I referenced at the beginning, in that 47-year period between 1949 and 1989, the price of Ontario slaughter steers never fell below $130 per hundredweight, nor did it breach Depression-era prices. Then in 1989 it did drop below $130 per hundredweight, and after 1989, cow prices continued to oscillate, as I mentioned, but they did so within a much lower range. So between 1989 and May of 2003, with the announcement of the case of BSE, instead of ranging between $130 and $280, prices actually went up to between $98 and $140 per hundredweight, so again a much smaller channel of returns available to cattle farmers.
At the same time, we see that the graph on page 10 looks at Ontario slaughter cows and the price of ground beef that someone going into the grocery store might pay. Some have suggested there has been a decline in consumption, therefore prices went down and therefore farmers are making less money--one plus one equals two. The problem is there's a “three” in the middle of all that, so you have relative stability for quite a long time of about $1.25 difference between what a farmer receives for his cull cow per pound and what was charged for ground beef in the grocery store. Then in 2003 it increases to about a $2 gap.
So this isn't about consumption. This is about the return to farmers, about who's actually receiving the income in the system, and by 2008 that gap had grown again to $2.25. So that's $1 a pound of the retail price that has gone elsewhere. That's not consumption. That's not anything else but money that used to go into the pockets of farmers. It's now being captured elsewhere in the system, and the only way around that is to make sure that farmers are empowered to get back that food dollar.
There's the old saying that there's lots of money to be made in agriculture; the problem is, none of it's in farming. We can see this graph bears that out, that there's money to be made in beef in Canada, but farmers have not been receiving a return.
Another way to look at this, and this is from CanFax on page 11-- this is from the Canadian Cattlemen's Association's own documents and own data. We suspect that if the data went back beyond 1999, we would discover the retail percentage of that steer that ended up in the hands of the cattle producer was probably more than 25%, and that we've seen a gradual decline, but the data just doesn't go back that far to be able to do that.
The Canadian Cattlemen's Association data is saying that between January of 1999 and July of this past year, the farmer's share of that retail price of the steer, what a farmer is receiving when he receives a steer and then it goes to the processor and ends up on the grocery shelf and what a consumer pays there...that farmer's share of that price has shrunk from 25% to 16%. That's a dramatic change, and again that's not about consumption; that's about the percentage of profit coming out of the retail price of beef that is no longer being captured by farmers.