A mix of drought in Canada’s prairies and flooding on its Pacific coast have brought about crop production and shipping woes now leading to international shortages of fries and mustard.
For example, McDonald’s has been forced to ration fries in Japan as the British Columbia floods squeezed potato imports, while mustard producers in France are forecasting steep price increases because the drought in another part of Canada — the world’s biggest producer of mustard grains — cut supplies.
“When we look back at the state of the agriculture sector in 2021, we can say this year has been marked by extreme climate change weather events,” Canadian Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food Marie-Claude Bibeau said in a recent speech.
Photo: AFP
“That includes the worst drought in 60 years in Western Canada and the devastating atmospheric rivers in British Columbia,” she told livestock farmers and ranchers who have struggled to secure enough hay to feed their animals as pastures dried up.
Farmers in Canada this year produced more corn but less wheat, canola, barley, soybeans and oats than last year, government data showed.
The lower yields — which Statistics Canada said marked the largest year-on-year decrease on record, falling to levels not seen in more than a decade — were driven largely by drought conditions in Western Canada.
“There’s a lot of angst in the farming community,” Canadian Federation of Agriculture vice president Keith Currie said.
Some farmers have lost everything, others are considering quitting as the future looks bleak.
The Agri-Food Analytics Labs at Dalhousie University publishes a list of the top 10 food-related stories each year. Climate calamities in Western Canada ranked second this year, after food inflation.
“Climate change has strongly impacted agricultural production and supply chains” already strained by the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to rising food costs, Agri-Food Analytics Labs scientific director Sylvain Charlebois said.
“This year saw extremes,” he said, adding that the town of Lytton in British Columbia recorded a Canadian record high temperature of 49.6°C.
It was later destroyed by wildfires.
Charlebois said that subsequent flooding in British Columbia showed that Canada’s westward supply links “are very, very vulnerable, and not resilient enough to climate change.”
Meanwhile, because of the drought, mustard seed production in the prairies this year halved to almost 50,000 tonnes, from last year.
As a result, the average price is expected to double to “a record US$1,700 per tonne,” Canada’s Agriculture and Agri-Food ministry said in a report.
The French region of Burgundy hosts the vast majority of mustard manufacturers, but depends heavily on Canadian farmers to produce the strong, tangy condiment consumed the world over.
Commodity markets analyst Ramzy Yelda said that droughts in Western Canada occur every 10 to 15 years on average, but this year’s “was particularly brutal.”
“I don’t think we’re done with these kinds of severe weather situations,” Currie said. “We’re going to continue seeing them more frequently.”
On the flip side, it was a banner year for Canadian potato producers who harvested 6.25 million tonnes of potatoes, up 18 percent from a year earlier.
The United Potato Growers of Canada said most provinces this year “enjoyed excellent harvest conditions without cool temperatures or wet conditions.”
However, record downpours in British Columbia last month, which trapped motorists in deadly mudslides, forced thousands to evacuate their homes and destroyed roads, rail lines and bridges also cut off the port of Vancouver from the rest of Canada.
That resulted in disruptions to exports from Canada’s largest port.
As a result, McDonalds restaurants in Japan announced that they would only sell small-sized French fries for a week from Friday to avoid running out.
“Due to large-scale flooding near the Port of Vancouver ... and the global supply chain crunch caused by the coronavirus pandemic, there are delays in the supply of potatoes,” it said in a statement on Tuesday.
The port had moved record volumes of grain and cargo by midyear, up 20 percent to 16.5 million tonnes from the same period a year earlier, to meet strong demand overseas, but a large backlog built up over several weeks last month.
As of Monday, the port said disruptions to rail operations serving it had “decreased significantly” and shipping volumes had “stabilized.”
Other commodities:
‧Gold for February delivery rose US$9.50 to US$1,811.70 an ounce, up 0.38 percent from a week earlier.
‧Silver for March delivery rose US$0.12 to US$22.94 an ounce, posting a weekly increase of 1.82 percent, while March copper was unchanged at US$4.39 a pound, but rose 2.09 percent on the week.
Additional reporting by AP
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