Sticky business: Quebec’s maple syrup farmers struggle with drop in global demand

financialpost.com:

Kinnear’s Mills, Que. — Founded a century ago as the Union Catholique des cultivateurs, Quebec’s powerful farmers’ organization in 1972 adopted a more inclusive name: the Union des producteurs agricoles (UPA), or agricultural producers’ union.

The union publishes a venerable weekly newspaper, La Terre de Chez Nous, which loosely translates to Our Soil. Generally a cheerleader for the province’s food business, the paper does not shy away from reporting bad news, and in July, it announced a bitter truth about maple syrup, Quebec’s sweetest export.

“Big drop in global sales of maple syrup,” read the headline, while the article said syrup sales have dropped 25 per cent in Europe, more than 25 per cent in Japan and 15 per cent to 20 per cent in the United States. Considering that thousands of farmers in Quebec are full-time syrup makers, and that their syrup cartel, itself a subset of the UPA, has invested many millions of dollars to taste, classify, store and market maple syrup, this was troubling news indeed.

Jean Marc Lavoie, general manager of the Granby, Que.-based Maple Industry Council, which bottles syrup for sale and export, said the picture is even more bleak than the newspaper reported.

“We are going to sell 40 per cent less syrup than last year,” he said.

We are going to sell 40 per cent less syrup than last year

Have consumers lost their sweet tooth? Not exactly. Global economic uncertainty means substitutes such as corn syrup from PepsiCo Inc.’s brand Pearl Milling Co. (formerly called Aunt Jemima) and other table syrups are muscling their way onto kitchen tables, Lavoie said. As a result, there may be trouble brewing in the billion-dollar business of that most emblematic of Canadian products, maple syrup.

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