EDITORIAL
Payback time
Rein Minnema doesn't bat an eye at the news. "Lots of them do it," says the gruff Middlesex county pork producer on hearing that another gang of animal feed ingredient suppliers has been nabbed for rigging the market.This time, it's the vitamins that go into animal feed, not lysine, an amino acid used in pig rations that was the subject of a massive FBI sting operation in the mid-1990s. The four lysine companies involved have already paid out $156 million in criminal fines and US$200 million in civil damages; Minnema has launched the first lawsuit in Canada, seeking $35 million in damages on behalf of Ontario pork producers.
The vitamin scam has all the elements of the lysine one, only on a larger scale: The $20-billion vitamin market reaches its long tentacles into the poultry farmer's feed bin and the school kid's breakfast bowl. As in the lysine case, there were the same clandestine meetings where executives would jack up prices and rig supply. When the U.S. Department of Justice pounced late last month, two large suppliers, Hoffman La Roche and BASF, fessed up and agreed to pay the largest ever criminal fines in history, more than C$1 billion. The lawyers are already lining up for a rash of civil suits from feed companies and farmers.
Despite some initial cold feet from the farm community, Minnema is slowly gaining support for his lysine class action from local pork associations, the Christian Farmers Federation of Ontario and lately the Canadian Pork Council.
For Minnema and other farmers worried about the dangers of cozy corporate clubs in agri-business, the vitamin story couldn't have broken at a better time - especially if it rallies the farm community around the cause. Minnema should not be a lone crusader in keeping corporate agriculture honest. Even if questionable pricing practices jacked Ontario farmers' input costs by five per cent, that's an extra $300 million out of the pockets of Ontario farmers.
Lysine, vitamins - what's next? Fuel? The U.S. anti-trust squad hints that more fun is on the way. Whatever the input, farmers face growing concentration among their suppliers - witness the recent announcement of the proposed merging of the No. 2 and 3 machinery companies.
Agreed - it will be difficult to tabulate individual farm losses when farmers have no idea how much lysine or vitamin B they fed. Nor should the shenanigans of two companies tar all others with the same brush.
But in these days of government cutbacks, any money paid out in
fines or
damages should be returned to agriculture in research, safety net
spending
or promotion. After all, it was farmers' money in the first
place. In the
U.S. corporate fines go into a Crime Victims Fund. Why not a Farm
Victims
Fund? In Canada, corporate fines go straight into general
revenues or the
Paul Martin Deficit Defence Fund. If fines are paid in the
vitamins case in
Canada, it's time the feds began sharing some of the money with
the real
victims of corporate crime.
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RURAL ROOTS
By Campbell Cork
The drifters and the undertaker
Generosity was in no short supply in the dirty '30s, but two men who drifted into Mount Forest in 1933 shouldn't have thought they could pull a fast one on the local Relief Officer.The hungry '30s saw men drifting around the country looking for work. They would help with harvests and follow rumours, hopes and prayers in search of work. Sometimes they would simply drift from place to place hoping for something to eat and somewhere to lay their head.
Times were tough, and most towns made some provision for helping these unfortunate wanderers. Mount Forest was no different. The town provided an old couch where they could sleep overnight.
The couch was in a back room of the town hall, which also housed the police office and the fire hall. The hose tower for hanging and drying fire hoses was adjoining. The upstairs of the town hall, like many in the area, had a formal theatre that was known in Mount Forest as the Opera House. The late Roy Grant graduated from Osgoode Hall in 1931 and set up his law practice on Main Street of Mount Forest. He was a highly respected personality throughout his long life in town. Today, the town swimming pool bears his name. He had grown up on a farm in Normanby township, Grey county, and as he recalled a few years ago, his experience on the family homestead left him with "the firm resolve not to become a farmer. I wanted to go to school."
As well as operating his law practice, he was town clerk in the 1930s and was in a position to witness that "almost every day there would be men walking from one place to another to see if they could get a bit of work."
Mount Forest had a system set up whereby one of the town councilors was appointed Relief Officer and put in charge of handing out meal tickets for Lamont's Restaurant, where breakfast cost 35 cents and lunch 50 cents.
"There's one instance I'll never forget," Roy said. "A chap by the name of Billy Lewis was the Relief Officer. He was also a member of council and an undertaker.
"One thing these men had to do sometimes in order to get their meal ticket was cut up some wood for the wood furnace at the town hall. "So one day a couple of chaps came into the Relief Office and wanted a couple of tickets for a meal.
"So Billy said, 'Before we give out tickets here, we always like to have a little bit of work done. There's some wood to cut up down at the town hall'."
Roy recalled that the indignant drifters were less than pleased with the 1930s version of workfare. "Oh, no, no. The hell with that," they said. Billy looked them in the eye and said, "There's the road out of town."
"Well, the chaps were hungry," Roy continued. "They came back to the Relief Office later, grudgingly offering to do the work: 'That wood you wanted cut, where is it?'."
Off they went and returned in half an hour saying the wood was done. "Billy said he was going down to take a look. He looked at one stick and then another, and then told the men, 'Out you get!'."
What the men didn't know was that Billy had marked the logs at the place the last drifters had left off cutting.
"The council was very economical in those days," Roy said.
"Anybody that
got anything had to do something
for it."
Campbell Cork lives and writes in Mount Forest
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Send them home in good health
Farm visits are in full swing this month. With city kids making
the yellow
bus trek to rural schoolmates' homes, it's a good time to
consider some
basic farm health precautions that go beyond the obvious
machinery and
heavy equipment guidelines.
Farms aren't necessarily rife with disease-causing organisms, but as David Alves, a vet with OMAFRA's Fergus health management department, points out, "they're raw food production sites where there are risks present all the time that we hope are small."
First off, says Alves, "Absolutely no one, full stop, should be drinking raw milk," including adults. There are carrier states, says Alves, for a number of bacterial infections that can be acquired from consuming or coming into contact with unpasteurized milk - including brucellosis, listeriosis, salmonella and campylobacter. A farmer with a low level of infection can pass it along to someone who doesn't have the immunity to fight it off, "and the young and the elderly are most at risk," adds Alves.
One has an underdeveloped immune system, the other's may be in decline. Neither should anyone, including farm families, be eating fruits or vegetables without some kind of processing, says Alves - "at the very least a good washing," which can go a long way toward preventing enteric or intestinal disorders that can arise from exposure to E. coli 0157. University of Guelph vet and professor of epidemiology Scott McEwen cautions against exposing visitors to sick animals, those that have been behaving abnormally or have recently had abortions. McEwen says that while the animals may not be clinically ill, there are organisms that people can pick up from handling such livestock.
Alves notes that while there's "a scary list, with text books to match," of so-called zoonotic diseases, diseases communicable from animals to humans under natural conditions, "like anything else we have to assign a risk factor to the potential for impact. A lot of this stuff is simply a disease that both animals and humans can get, and to always connect the two is a bit of a stretch."
One zoonotic illness Ontario farmers don't have to worry about is hantavirus, which can be found in the droppings of deer mice. The airborne virus, which has infected 20 Albertans since 1989, killing six, hasn't been found in humans east of the Saskatchewan border, according to Ministry of Health vet Chuck Leberr: "We thought we had a case here, but were mistaken." Of concern to Leberr is farmers who ignore flu-like symptoms, including night sweats, intermittent high fevers, aches and pains in the joints. Those symptoms could indicate brucellosis (or undulant fever), which can become chronic. "It's a bacteria that can go right through intact skin," says Leberr, so while you can get it from drinking unpasteurized milk on the farm or abroad from milk or cheese, it can also be acquired through splashing.
Certainly farmers, in seeking treatment for a suspected illness,
should
always make the health professional aware of their business, says
Perth
county medical officer of health Dr. Susan Tamblyn. It can
provide clues to
what might be going on, she says, especially with toddlers, "who
may have
happened to hug Dad's dirty overalls when he came in from the
barn, or
played on the laundry pile, and come in contact with fecal
material." Her
hit list for staying healthy on farms boils down to avoiding
direct contact
with bacteria, contaminated water and raw milk.
- Richard Charteris
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