The House of Commons agriculture committee has issued a wide-ranging plea for federal agriculture policy and Agriculture Canada to be more farmer-sensitive.
It calls on the federal government to set aside $1 billion for quick reaction to agriculture sector disasters.
It calls on Agriculture Canada to recruit more farm-aware staff to compensate for a growing gap between agriculture bureaucrats’ knowledge and on-farm realities.
And it proposes tougher rules to allow the Competition Bureau to investigate and penalize anti-competitive practices in an increasingly concentrated retail food sector.
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“Like farmers, members of the standing committee are particularly concerned about the domination and concentration at some levels of the agrifood chain,” said the report. “Committee members are convinced that concentration is detrimental to the development and positioning of Canadian agricultural products in the marketplace. Ultimately, it is farmers and small merchants in the agrifood chain who foot the bill.”
The 71 page report on future agricultural policy tabled with Parliament in late June began with a stirring call to arms: “Canadian agriculture is much like Canada itself: dynamic, diversified, enterprising, complex, highly regulated and in debt.”
The deeply divided committee needed special approval to table a report with the clerk of the Commons after MPs had left for the summer. It had held months of hearings and there was a chance the report would not be published until autumn when many safety net decisions would already have been made.
Delays came because Conservative government MPs, in the minority, were at odds with opposition MPs in the majority. Long debates and Conservative filibustering held up completion of the report on what should be in the next generation of farm policies.
But through the political stalemate, MPs devised some powerful recommendations:
- Ottawa should keep farmers in the policy loop by creating a national advisory committee on farm policy and programs that includes all national farm groups.
- The annual Agricultural Outlook Conference that was a fixture of the scene until the Mulroney Conservatives killed it in the late 1980s should be revived to give farmers a chance to see what may be coming and to make federal bureaucrats accountable.
- Regulations should be amended to make sure that any food item labelled “product of Canada” must have at least 51 percent content from Canada. Current rules say only that 51 percent of the costs of the product should have originated in Canada, meaning foreign product could be processed here and be considered a Canadian product.
- The government should encourage more “buy Canadian” campaigns and encourage retailers to put more Canadian products on their shelves.
- A responsive and flexible disaster program should be included in the next farm policy structure.
- Supply management should be designated part of the business risk management program.
- Federal agriculture research spending should designate a fair share to primary production research.
- A one-stop information source should be established to inform producers about research developments and market opportunities flowing from them.
- Ottawa should thoroughly analyze the impact of biofuel feedstock demand on livestock feed costs before the government continues to commit support to biofuel.
The committee also recommended tax and investment breaks for young farmers trying to get into the business.
