Prices of meat and seafood on the rise

VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – Throwing a steak on the barbeque or cooking up some crab may be a little harder on your wallet this summer.

The prices of some meat and some seafood are both on the rise.

There are several possibilities for what’s behind the increase in beef prices. There’s been talk of drought in the US perhaps being a factor, as well as grain prices being high until a short time ago and a very cold winter where cattle is raised.

The Vancouver Sun reports a UBC agricultural economist says wholesale beef prices have gone up by 30 per cent over the last year.

The average retail price for ground beef in this country has gone up about 11 per cent over the last year. It has gone up more than 40 per cent over the last four years.

Assistant Professor Jessica Cao with Guelph University says drought makes feeding costs high, and so it can be expensive for a producer to keep their herd size up. “A lot of producers actually rationally choose to decrease their herd size by slaughtering them or by killing them for meat rather than keeping them for breeding for the next round.”

A virus that has killed millions of pigs in the US has also affected wholesale prices of pork. That virus has been found in a number of herds here in Canada, as well.

“If we take into account the virus and with unexpected animal diseases, animal production or livestock production can be very different from other agriculture sectors in the sense that in case of an adverse event to those animals, it can take fairly long to re-establish or recover the herd size,” says Cao.

Dungeness crab is a lot more expensive, too; it’s more than twice what it was this time last year. Demand in Asia and a bad catching year are said to be behind that. Some stores aren’t selling it, while others aren’t aiming to make a profit.