Achi news desk-
It’s a sticky situation for Canadian maple syrup producers.
Reserves of the popular pancake topper are dwindling and new numbers from Statistics Canada show maple syrup production has hit a five-year low.
According to the government, production fell from a record high of 79 million liters in 2022 to just over 47 million liters this year.
And in Quebec, the country’s largest strategic reserve of syrup has dropped to just 6.9 million pounds – just a fraction of the 133 million pounds it was built to hold.
The slow supply of syrup isn’t causing producers to panic yet, but a perfect storm of several unseasonably warm winters combined with a continued increase in demand that hasn’t let up since the start of the pandemic means that if reserves at back stabilizing prices continue to decrease, shoppers may have a bout of sticker shock at the grocery store.
Quebec is trying to avoid such a situation, expanding with a campaign to distribute seven million additional tapes throughout the province, to be installed by April 2026, and encouraging people to apply for production on private and public forests.
Everyone tapped out
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This is not the first time in recent memory that Quebec has reported that it has maxed out.
In 2021, the organization that governs Quebec’s maple syrup producers announced that it would release about 50 million pounds of its reserve after discovering that demand for syrup was greater than supply.
As people were kept at home due to COVID-19 restrictions, their reliance on domestic maple syrup increased and Canadian maple syrup exports rose 20 percent in 2020.
The 2021 sugar season, when sap is extracted from sugar maple trees, was also cut short by a warm winter, leading to reduced supply.
Fortunately, that year’s cold winter allowed for a record-breaking crop in the 2022 sugar season, but that was just enough to meet the growing demand for the sticky stuff and not enough to replenish the reserve.
And, now, mild winters over the past two years have put the producers on guard once again. Although a warm winter does not necessarily mean a bad year for syrup supply, if the weather stays warm too long during the sugaring season, the sap turns its energy towards helping the maple buds, affect the taste of the juice and put an end to sugaring. term.
Drama in the syrup world
While producers aren’t sounding the syrup supply alarm yet, it’s worth noting that the world relies heavily on Quebec for its supply of the sugary stuff – the province produces nearly three-quarters of the world’s maple syrup supply -wide and exports the product to more than 60. countries.
The reserve, operated by the Quebec Maple Syrup Producers Federation, was created in 2000, banking on the long shelf life of pasteurized syrup, which can sit for years without spoiling.
Disaster and drama hit the reserve in 2012, when it was discovered that nearly 10,000 barrels of syrup had been drained in the now infamous “Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist”, to the tune of $18.7 million in pilfered syrup.
The thieves, over the months, used trucks to transport barrels of syrup to a distant sugarcane, siphoning off the syrup and refilling them with water before returning them to the reserve. As time went on, the thieves became more brazen, returning empty barrels to the reserve without refilling them.
The operation came down, literally, when an inspector started climbing barrels in one of the reserve’s warehouses and almost fell because of the empty barrels.
Several perpetrators of the sophisticated illegal operation, including ringleader Richard Vallières, were convicted in the robbery, with Vallières telling the court during his trial that he sold the stolen syrup for $10 million and made a profit of $1 million.
Large-scale theft of the popular export struck again a few years later, when thieves broke into a Montreal shipping yard in 2016 and made off with about $150,000 worth of maple syrup for the Japanese market.
& copy 2024 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
