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当加拿大人应对当前大流行所面临的许多挑战时，他们也关心农场浪费的食物数量。
加拿大扔掉了多达5000万升的牛奶in recent weeks。More than two million eggs were eliminated from the food chain, and there are reports of large numbers of pigs and chickens being euthanized because they couldn’t be harvested or properly stored.
在魁北克，La Presse最近报道了200,000只鸡的摘取。上个月，Bloomberg reportedmore than 90,000 pigs were killed and discarded in Canada. None of this is sitting well with Canadians, especially as COVID-19 has created greater concerns around food insecurity.
达尔豪西大学（Dalhousie University）周三发布的全国调查结果表明，大多数加拿大人认为，在这种情况下对安乐死的动物应该是非法的，几乎一半的人表明，农民也应该倾倒牛奶以获取公平价格也应该是非法的。
“I believe there’s certainly great products being produced in Canada by our farmers, whether it’s pork, beef, milk, but I think there’s some level of transparency and accountability that needs to be shown to Canadians, especially in 2020 when over three million people have lost their jobs and now are going to food banks by the thousands,” Dalhousie University professor Sylvain Charlebois said in an interview Tuesday.
“To me, it’s a bit insulting for trade groups to just politicize the issue and move on and say, ‘Well, there’s nothing we can do about it.’ Actually, I think you can and that’s kind of why we’ve generated this report.”
Dalhousie University的Agri Food Analytics Lab的最新COVID调查与Caddle合作，这是一家研究公司，专注于农业食品领域的消费者见解。夏兰（Charlebois）表示，他们的目标是找出加拿大人对农门废物的看法，以及应该做什么。
“I was actually quite surprised at the number of people that actually do believe that food waste on the farm is inexcusable and should be considered as illegal,” he said.
“Food waste on the farm is the big elephant in the room for farmers. They just don’t want to talk about it, they don’t want to report it, and they don’t report it unless they really have to.”
When asked if farmers should euthanize their healthy hogs/pigs in order to get a fair price, 53.55% of respondents answered that it should be illegal, while 23.7% said it should only be permitted under exceptionally difficult circumstances such as a pandemic.
Slightly more Canadians, (54.4%), thought euthanizing chickens should be illegal, with 24.4% believing COVID-19 or a pandemic was a good reason to euthanize them.
“That was really a shocker for me. I was expecting to see a lot of people, but not the majority,” Charlebois said.
在新斯科舍省的受访者中，有53.1％的人认为杀死健康的猪/猪应该是非法的，而55％的猪认为鸡鸡应该是非法的。
当涉及丢弃牛奶的实践时，加拿大人中有48.3％认为应该是非法的。在新斯科舍省受访者中，这个数字上升到51.6％。
In total, 25.7% of Canadians felt that a pandemic gives farmers and the industry a valid excuse.
“I think people appreciate that farmers are really stuck. They’re not solely responsible for the waste. This is a supply chain issue, and it came out in the results,” Charlebois said.
“Supply management is designed not to have any waste, we’re not supposed to be dumping milk or killing chickens or wasting eggs.”
Charlebois said while there are reports of farmers regularly dumping milk on several occasions over the last 20 years, the difference now is the sheer volume of waste as a result of COVID.
“Dumping is not unusual in Canada, and this is a problem we need to fix because people are paying for this milk,” he said. “You have quotas sanctioned by the government to produce this milk and you’re partially subsidized now, by taxpayers. You shouldn’t be dumping milk.”
Charlebois said Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government “did the right thing” when it recently gave a $200 million credit to the Canadian Dairy Commission (CDC), a Crown Corporation.
“他们需要做的就是制定处理盈余的策略。但是，如果丢弃更便宜，他们不会激励他们在框外思考，这就是问题所在。”他说。
“倾倒牛奶是最简单的事情。当然还有房间里的另一只大象？这与定价非常重要。您想保持公平的价格。”
While farmgate waste can never be entirely eliminated, Charlebois said stakeholders would be forced to find better solutions to surpluses if discarding supply managed commodities (dairy, poultry and eggs) was deemed an illegal practice.
“我们提案的核心是处理。这是供应链中被遗忘的孩子……您需要提高能力。”他解释说。
Because they operate within a free-market environment and are exposed to external pressures, he said non-supply management commodities require better vertical coordination with processors.
As an example of this commodity, Charlebois points to pigs. They’re very expensive to feed, and the longer they sit on the lot the more costly it becomes.
他说：“这就是为什么他们想尽快抛弃产品，因此我绝对可以欣赏。”“最重要的是，如今，当您看待未来时，猪是一文不值的，这就是为什么确实没有动力让它们保持周围的动力，因为养活它们的花费比对它们实施安乐死要多。”
That means making wasting product illegal “would not serve these (non-supply management) sectors well” and it’s why Charlebois points to processing as the centrepiece of any agri-food value chain strategy. He believes it’s time for producers to work differently with processors.
“For me, it’s always been an issue of value chains. It’s about sharing. So what you would see say in Holland or Denmark is more vertical coordination where farmers and processors work together to coordinate activities together,” Charlebois explained.
“They share objectives, and to a certain extent share profits too. In Canada, there’s such a division that farmers are left on their own and processors are left on their own and they hate each other, and that’s not helpful. Especially in a time of crisis.”
他还指出，合作社在危机期间对农民有帮助，尽管大流行，但在“很好”的人中，盖利亚和阿格罗普尔表现“很好”。
“That’s a governance model that should be promoted to nurture and foster this whole issue of vertical coordination,” he said.
He also points to the need for tax incentives for research and development of new products and programs.
他说：“我只是希望Covid能使所有利益相关者共同努力，并开始真正地作为供应链。”“我们需要认识到，这一切的锚就是处理，没有这些，没有任何可行，农民是第一个付款的人。”
The survey also looked at how Canadians felt about food security and access to the proper food they needed to be healthy both before and during the pandemic. A year before the pandemic, 72.6% of Canadians felt they had enough of the food they wanted and didn’t consider access to food an issue. That sentiment dropped by more than 11 percentage points in May of this year, falling to 61%.
婴儿潮一代（被确定为1946年至1964年之间出生的人）对农场废物和农场动物的安乐死更加强烈。总共有65％的人认为农场上的牛奶垃圾应该是非法的。对于猪来说，率为68.3％，对于鸡，68.9％。
Among millenials (those identified as born between 1981 and 1996), only 40.1% believed discarding raw milk should be illegal. For pigs, that percentage goes up to 45.5%, and for chickens, 45.3%.
当被问及农民应采取什么措施来减少浪费时，有48％的加拿大人认为，农民应该做“任何需要”将其产品提供给慈善机构，但应该为此进行补偿。
共有19.3％的受访者认为加拿大农民应捐款而没有任何赔偿。此外，不管情况如何，有6.7％的人对杀死牲畜和丢弃产品的想法感到满意。
A total of 1,563 Canadians were surveyed between May 11 and 13, 2020. The sample carries a margin of error of +/- 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
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As an engineer who has contributed to the design of poultry and pork processing facilities, the reality is that the meat processing industry, despite a supply of largely immigrant work willing to do difficult, dangerous, dirty work for close to minimum wage is very focused on reducing labor costs. The result is a slaughter and processing industry that is incredibly efficient (that is why you can buy a cooked chicken at Superstore for less than an hour worth of minimum wage labor), but terribly inflexible in dealing with, for instance, changes in the size of meat chickens, which is why edible birds are being killed and composted.