Pork producers attending Manitoba Pork Council's 2011 annual general meeting in Winnipeg endorsed a bylaw that will reduce the organisation's number of geographic districts from six to two and re-organise its board of directors.

Pork Council Chair, Karl Kynoch, says under the plan directors will be elected directly by producers, the delegate body will be replaced by an advisory body and the number of advisors compared to the number of delegates will be reduced from 66 to about 22.

Karl Kynoch – Manitoba Pork Council

We're running into some issues especially in the western side of the province where we've really seen a lot of producers disappear.

In fact, in the last four years, we've had about 56 per cent of the producers have disappeared and it's been a challenge to fill some of the delegate slates and some areas will have two potentially very good leaders and they've been restricted from coming on.

What we don't want to do is restrict any very good potential leaders of the industry to be able to get on as an advisor and get on as a director down the road because we want to make sure that we have the best possible industry spokesmen and leaders.

What we're trying to do is keep the same cross section of producer representation as we've had in the past.

We had 11 directors at the board in the past and going forward we're going to have that same number of directors.

We've left the three production districts having three representatives, the Hutterite Brethren have two representatives and six of the other directors are going to come across from the geographical districts so we'll still have the same level of representation that we had before.

We're going to take the advisors and we're also going to try to spread them out across the province also.

Percentage-wise, we're going to try to keep the same amount of representation from across the province.

Mr Kynoch acknowledges while some are not happy with the change, there is a realisation change is needed going forward. The restructuring takes effect following Manitoba Pork Council's 2012 annual general meeting.