Tinkering with current agricultural programs is a bit like painting the lifeboats instead of trying to avoid the icebergs.
A little while ago I was reminded of a comment I made from the audience at a public meeting held in Keady in the wake of the announcement of a single case of BSE in May of 2003. At that meeting I used an analogy to express my concern that government and most of the farm leadership at the time was just not seeing the big picture when it came to Canada’s beef sector. I stated that beef farmers were on a train speeding towards a bridge over a ravine and that bridge was out. BSE had come along and knocked the train off the tracks before we got to that bridge, but simply putting the train back on the rails and trying to get it up to full speed again was not going to be enough. The bridge, I pointed out, was still out and low prices and poor returns were coming if we did not do anything to change directions. I was told I was being alarmist and that good times would return as soon as the border opened, which we were told was just ‘days away.’ (Another thing the farm leadership of the time got wrong.)
There are times when the pleasure of “I told you so” is a good one, but being reminded of those comments was not one of those times. This is especially true when you think of the current drive around risk management programming. It is as if no one is willing to learn from history.
Let’s look a bit at this history. During the early part of 2003 there was a near unprecedented coming together of provincial governments and farm organizations joining in common cause against the Chrétien government’s plan to bring in the program we now know as CAIS (Canadian Agricultural Income Stabilization program). That officials from the Ontario Federation and Canadian Federation’s of Agriculture broke solidarity on an Ontario farm was a shock to the many across the country demanding a better program and put then Ontario Minister Helen Johns in a no-win situation. The thing is though, all programs since, whether we call it CAIS or Agri-Stability are built on the same shaky, politically motivated foundation, a foundation whose failure should be laid at the feet of those officials and their organizations.
CAIS, and its name-changing successor program Agri-Stability, are margin based programs. Leave aside all the weirdness about how assessments are made within the program, which is the reality, but that does not get to the root of the problem. The real problem is that in situations of declining margins these programs cannot possibly work, because they are designed to not work. Declining margins means declining eligibility at a time when farmers need help the most. Increasing margins means that assistance decreases even if you have eaten through all of your equity and maxed out loans just to get by. There are only two possible times when the program can work to actually help farmers in ways that are useful – at the top of the trough and just as you hit the bottom of the trough in terms of income cycles.
It is time for farm groups to stop trying to shuffle the deck chairs on a sinking industry. What they are doing is essentially worrying about the paint on the lifeboats instead of trying to avoid the icebergs.
True, in the current dysfunctional marketplace we need some programming to get farmers through. But real fixes to that programming would be calling for much smaller and more realistic caps on payments so that the first group served is the family farm, not large corporate agriculture and throwing open the books to determine who is really benefiting from government spending, because anecdotally we know it is not the average family farm.
Of course the best program would be no program. Farmers, for the most part, do not want to make their living dependent on a government cheque. We have a completely dysfunctional marketplace in most non-supply managed commodities in Canada, especially in the red meat sectors right now. If government and other farm organizations really wanted to do something they would control the monopolies and near-monopolies that are damaging farmers’ incomes. They will not of course, because they haven’t the will or desire to stand up to these giants, but that is what is needed. Give us a true open, free and balanced market and farmers will make a living on their own. Trouble is we have not had one of those in Canada for several decades and the problem is getting worse, not better. That bridge is still out, and no one seems to have plans to fix it.
Grant Robertson is the senior elected official with the National Farmers Union-Ontario. As Ontario Coordinator Robertson is also a National Board Member of the NFU. Grant and his family farm near Paisley, Ontario. The author can be contacted at coordinator@nfuontario.ca
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