Winnipeg Harvest Applauds Manitoba Food Bank Initiative

CANADA - Winnipeg Harvest is applauding the efforts of the various partners in a program designed to direct pork to Manitoba food banks, writes Bruce Cochrane.
calendar icon 25 April 2008
clock icon 3 minute read

Earlier this week the Manitoba government announced the province will provide 500 thousand dollars to help cover the cost of processing hogs culled under the Federal Cull Breeding Swine Program so that meat can be directed to the province's food banks.

Winnipeg Harvest executive director David Northcott says the hope is to make use of as much of that meat as possible.

David Northcott-Winnipeg Harvest

We've got several partners we're working with to deliver these goods.

The first one is the Manitoba Association of Food Banks and that's the distribution arm that's been moving food throughout Manitoba for many years now.

Indeed the association is just over a year old but we've been working together with a number of food banks for many years so there's a template and a fair share model already for food so, once the pork is processed, we'll be able to just simply add the pork on those distribution models for food banks in Manitoba.

The other partnership we're working with is the Manitoba Chambers of Commerce, the legendary Mennonite Central Committee and of course Manitoba Pork Council.

Those three partners with Winnipeg Harvest and the Manitoba Association of Food Banks will look at organizing a processing system that's a fair distribution of these dollars throughout the province as well.

The ideal if people choose to participate and I know the pork producers still have to choose to participate but we're aiming for 150 thousand kilograms of processed product.

We're asking the public as well if they can add to this pool of cash that the province has put on the table because we would like to widen that goal and try and cull as many sows as we possibly can in the window of time that we have available to us.

As long as this federal program runs we want to make sure we direct as much of it to food banks as possible.


Northcott encourages producers who plan to participate in the cull swine program to contact Winnipeg harvest or one of the food bank initiative partners to redirect their product for processing.

He notes they're moving their product anyway and he would like it to go to the food banks.

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