Jordan Weissmann:
On Friday, news broke
that thieves had stolen $30 million dollars worth of Quebec's strategic
maple syrup reserves. Much as the United States keeps a stock of extra
oil buried in underground salt caverns to use in case of a geopolitical
emergency, the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers has been
managing warehouses full of surplus sweetener since 2000. The crooks
seem to have made off with more than a quarter of the province's backup
supply. (I personally suspect these guys.)
Why
exactly does Canada need to stockpile syrup? To find out, I called up
Michael Farrell, an extension associate at Cornell University's College
of Agricultural and Life Sciences, and an expert in all things maple.
"We
think of it as a little cottage industry here in the states," he told
me. "But up there [syrup is] a big industry that's responsible for a lot
of people's livelihoods."
Canada took over from the United States as the world's leader in syrup in the 1940s, as shown in this graph from a paper
Farrell co-authored last year. Today, Quebec taps 75 percent of the
world's supply, and its producers have been attempting to grow their
market abroad. Shipments to Japan, for instance, rose 252 percent
between 2000 and 2005.
But harvesting maple is a fickle business, and that makes expanding
the industry tricky. The trees need cold nights and mildly warm days to
yield sap, meaning production can vary greatly year to year based on the
weather. That's a potential problem for the big syrup buyers, whether
they're bottlers or large food companies that make cookies or cereal.
Quaker can't pour a bunch of time and money into developing a
maple-and-brown-sugar-flavored version of Life, only to find out it
won't be able to get enough of its ingredients, or that they'll have to
pay through the nose for each liter of syrup.
"If
you are trying to develop a market for something, you don't want to
create a demand and not be able to supply it," Farrell said.
I did not know that the Quebec Maple Syrup Producers have been stockpiling maple syrup. If you are going to store it, you better provide some security. However, how could our politicians let us fall behind Canada in something other than niceness, health care availability or hockey players?
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