Thank you very much to the committee for inviting us to attend. I'm Jurgen Preugschas, the chair of the Canadian Pork Council, and with me today is Martin Rice, our executive director. We do appreciate the opportunity to speak to you as our producers continue to battle the unprecedented period of losses we've been sustaining on our farms.
We're into our third year now in an ever-changing set of shocks that is coming to our industry. While the crisis started and was set into motion by the rapidly rising exchange rate and the high feed costs, those particular variables have moderated now. Unfortunately, they have been replaced by the whole global economic crisis, which is reducing access to credit. Then in addition, of course, there is the U.S. introduction of mandatory country of origin labelling.
As our sector relies on exports so strongly—in fact, two out of three hogs born in Canada are exported either as live hogs or as pork products—our sector is especially susceptible to global shocks.
We do want to thank the committee for paying attention to the livestock sector during this very difficult time, and we thank the government and the parties who allowed the legislation for the advance payments program, which did help us through the short term. We do thank Minister Ritz for recently announcing the stay of default on those advances and for providing us with more time for repayment. We're quite sure that we'll find a suitable repayment period for that.
We also appreciate the cull breeding swine program. Even though a downsizing of the industry is always difficult, this did allow producers to leave the industry with dignity.
And we have downsized a lot more than the cull breeding swine program anticipated. We've had a lot of producers leave the industry, and the numbers are there to prove it. The Statistics Canada numbers are showing dramatic decreases in the past two years. They show 13.7% fewer farms reporting having hogs in 2009 than the previous year, and 11.3% fewer in 2008 than in 2007. So you in fact have 28% fewer farms across Canada reporting having hogs now compared with January 2006. The hog inventories are down 10.2% from January of last year and a full 18% down from two years ago. These are really significant decreases.
Today we want to remind this committee that while we're trying to remain optimistic about our long-term potential in the Canadian hog sector, it really is increasingly difficult to be prepared for and to manage the shocks that continue to hit us, which are outside of our control.
The most pressing of these shocks right now is COOL, and I'd like to pass over to Mr. Rice to speak on that.