Slaughterhouse closure a blow to industry, says beef exporter
Last Updated: Friday, August 17, 2007 | 2:45 PM MT
CBC News
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A slaughterhouse near Calgary that opened just over a year ago to become the largest Canadian-owned beef processing plant in the country has shut down.
The closure of Rancher's Beef is another blow to the Canadian cattle industry, said Ted Haney, with the Canada Beef Export Federation.
"It will likely reduce our exports, and exports is what we need in order to recover from our BSE trade crisis which has stretched on now well over four years."
The plant, east of Balzac, employed about 260 people and could slaughter about 800 animals a day.
Its closure means Alberta's ranchers will have to increase their dependence on the U.S. market, Haney added.
President Antonio Martinez said the family-owned plant could re-open, but it would have to be under new ownership.
"If you threw a dart at the wall you couldn't have picked a worse time to open a facility in the beef industry," he said. "I mean the margins were at 10 year lows."
Martinez says the owners had also banked on opening up more markets outside of the U.S.
"The markets that we would want to be in like Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan — those type of markets in Asia — we just couldn't get there."
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