B.C.’s apple sector has been in decline for the past several years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, extreme weather events and competition with American fruit growers.
Industry leaders have been working on several ideas to help improve the industry and new ways to collaborate on marketing their apples.
“Growers aren’t earning as much money as what they used to and they’re doing several things like converting to grapes or cherries, or many just let it lay fallow because they’re not ready to invest in that yet,” said BC Fruit Growers Association Special Projects manager Glen Lucas.
“We’ve done several studies to look into that and a couple of the earlier studies recommend organizing and coming up with orderly marketing, instead of all the infighting and chaos that we see in our industry, and try to bring some order to it. The government recognized this and they started initially the Tree Fruit Industry Stabilization Plan to get it stable and orderly.”
BC Fruit Growers Association (BCFG) hopes to help the industry rebound with the potential formation of a BC Apple Marketing Commission.
According to BCFG, the potential to establish a commission, like Ontario, Quebec, Michigan and New York, has drawn real interest.
“When the commission is formed it’s given powers and authority by government and its power to act collectively and collaboratively and those powers are granted by the government,” said Lucas.
“It’s different things like collecting data is one of the things that been proposed, implementing quality standards so that it’s fair and universal and we don’t have people cheating on the quality standards. And another one is promotion, generic permission to let people know to buy apples. But to be fair, everyone pays their fair share of that promotion, no one can be a free rider and so on.”
However, not everyone is on board with the idea of a commission.
On Monday, a group of apple farmers opposed to the idea of an apple marketing commission gathered in Cawston to voice their opinion.
“We already have enough regulations to deal with and we don’t want to deal with another one,” said Cawston Organic Grower and Independent Packer Jarnail Gill.
“This is an overly complicated regulation; some authority is trying to bring this, including BCFG who’s supposed to be supporting growers. It doesn’t matter if they’re co-op growers or they’re independent growers. They need to listen to the concerns of the industry.”
“This group of growers and myself included disagree with that position, very strongly,” said Cawston Cold Storage owner Billy Potash.
“Nobody thinks that it’s going to solve anything. It’s going to create a level of bureaucracy, which is going to tax the grower a levy, but a levy is a tax, with no ability to accomplish anything. Because it doesn’t have the authority to limit imports.”
Gurpreet Lidder, who spoke on behalf of Lidder Farms in Cawston, echoed the same concerns about competition with American growers.
“It’s a concept that just kind of penalizes the growers here and I think a lot of people that don’t have all the information and don’t understand. They’ll realize once we lose that power to grow freely,” said Lidder.
“We don’t want to lose our freedom. At the same time, we don’t want to be penalized, they can’t ignore the imports coming into the country. The retailers have the choice to purchase product and we don’t want to be at a disadvantage because we have to pay a levy and be controlled and lose our ultimate rights to farm, produce and sell our product as we have been for years.”
Lidder said two-thirds of the industry is strongly against the idea, adding that he believes it will only create more red tape.
“When you’re facing tough times, you blindly believe information. The concept they keep on saying is that they’ll get better returns, but we don’t see how,” said Lidder.
“All this cost ultimately goes down to the grower. We just want to have the freedom, we already have regulations and quality standards already set by our customers and we don’t need somebody else controlling us.”
Meanwhile, BCFG is holding small grower meetings in Oliver, Cawston, Kelowna, and Vernon this week, in addition to online meetings for growers to learn more and provide feedback.
The final decision to establish a commission requires the support of B.C. apple growers in a non-binding vote and enabling regulation by the provincial government to begin operation.
“We’ve had several meetings and our consultant that we hired for the first round, his recommendations were to move quickly and make a decision,” said Lucas.
“There seemed to be a general positive response. There was a range, and many growers are undecided. That’s why we’re reaching out and telling them the pros and the cons of the apple marketing commission. I’d say overall we’ll find out when there’s a vote and I don’t think we’ll know before then.”
BC Fruit Growers is hoping to go to a vote before crops start budding in May.
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