Baba Amina Khelil, M.Sc., Agronomist and Marie Ève Tremblay, B.Sc., Director General of the Federation of lamb and sheep producers in Quebec (la Fédération des producteurs d’agneaux et moutons du Québec) recently published a presentation on market trends and perspectives for sheep meat in the world and Quebec. This presentation outlines a brief history of sheep production, flock size and marketing in New Zealand, France and Quebec.
Some interesting information from this presentation is as follows:
Page 6 graph shows the change in export volume, production and export value in New Zealand lamb from 2003 to 2011. 2008 shows a peak in production and exports with a slow decrease in both production and exports from then through 2011.
New Zealand exports are now 19% refrigerated and 81% frozen versus only 2% refrigerated in 1990. 3% of the New Zealand export by volume went to Canada and 7% to the United States in 2011.
Consumption of lamb has decreased in France from 5.4kg per year per person to 3.3kg in 2010.
Quebec has an organized heavy market for lambs. This is designed to ensure a continuous supply of lambs and adequate income to producers with a guarantee of payment.
Page 23 shows a graph comparing the price of light lambs which are not regulated to the price of heavy lamb in Quebec from January 2010 to September 2012. Page 24 shows a graph which compares the price of heavy lambs in Alberta, Ontario and Quebec from January 2011 to September 2012. which illustrates that Quebec has been able to maintain a much more stable price for their heavy lambs than prices received in Alberta or Ontario.
The complete french PDF document.
For those who do not read french, google translate can provide a basic understanding of the document. You will need to save the french document to your computer and then use google translate by clicking on the blue words translate document below the box then browse for the document on your computer and then press the blue translate button.
