Inside the pressures facing Quebec’s billion-dollar maple syrup industry – By Jillian Kestler-D’Amours (Al Jazeera) / April 15, 2024
Canadian province supplies most of the world’s maple syrup, but climate change is raising new questions for producers.
Saint-Urbain-Premier, Quebec, Canada – In clear safety glasses and heavy beige overalls, Jean-Francois Touchette is in his element.
All around him are pipes, tubes, temperature gauges and various humming instruments: all the machinery needed to turn tree sap into maple syrup.
Touchette’s syrup operation is a small one, run out of a modest, two-storey wooden building at the end of a long dirt driveway in rural Quebec.
But as winter turns to spring, Touchette — like thousands of other maple growers in the Canadian province — faces pressure to collect, boil and bottle his harvest.
“It’s a small factory. I’m really at a small scale, but it’s the same, same, same [setup] as the bigger ones,” he told Al Jazeera on a sunny morning in early April, one of the last days of this year’s maple season.
