OTTAWA – Those who believe the major challenges facing Canada’s supply management system are new world trade rules taking effect this year are wrong, says agriculture minister Ralph Goodale.
The real challenge is to recapture the spirit of national co-operation between farmers, regions and provinces which led to the creation of national supply management systems in the first place.
The new General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) rules will force Canada to change the way it protects marketing agencies from cheaper imports by using import tariffs rather than quantity controls. It also will force them to change the levy system used to subsidize export of surplus product.
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Dispute between provinces
But the 1994 attempt to redesign orderly marketing systems to accommodate these changes has been riddled with disputes between regions and provinces over market share, pricing and rules.
“In terms of the technical requirements to comply with the GATT, I’m satisfied that by the time the relevant GATT date comes along for each commodity in 1995, all the commodity groups will be technically ready for the transition to comprehensive tariffication,” Goodale said in a year-end interview.
“The larger challenge in supply management which became very clear in 1994 … is the whole notion of whether there is the voluntary domestic political will to work with each other, to make the system function.”
Rules imposed
Goodale said the old GATT rules “imposed co-operation on us” by making it clear that quantitative border controls would be legal only if there was a national production control system operating behind the barrier.
Now, that international requirement is gone and regions that lived under the same supply management rules for several decades have discovered that imposed discipline masked different, sometimes conflicting, production and pricing interests.
“With GATT article 11 no longer there, we no longer have that international rule that says to Canada ‘thou shall co-operate with each other’,” said the minister. “Doing voluntarily what we now have to do by law is the longer term challenge for supply management.”
He said there has been some progress in finding ways to create farmer co-operation. “But far more progress is definitely necessary.”
