Many farmers harbour an understandable suspicion of academics or bureaucrats (or journalists for that matter), who pontificate about what should or should not be happening in agriculture.
But there is one subset of these city slicker pontificators that farmers actually need more of – thoughtful, skilled and independent academics and analysts who can cast a sharp eye and educated mind over agricultural policy or conditions and offer credible opinions about the good, the bad and the ugly.
For there is, in this country, a glaring lack of independent credible analysis of agricultural issues. The sector is the worse for it.
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While there are a few policy think-tanks in the country, most are seen rightly or wrongly as lacking independence from clients or ideologies.
Guelph’s George Morris Centre is arguably the most prominent think-tank with the most quoted researchers and analysts, but its focus has become increasingly management skills and value chain issues rather than the broader national agriculture political debate.
The Canadian Agriculture Policy Institute, founded a little over four years ago with a large dollop of Agriculture Canada money and a home on Agriculture Canada property, has yet to prove it is more than a forum to recycle policy ideas and assumptions that have been floating around the department for the past few decades.
Its website declares: “CAPI is a nonprofit corporation, operating at arm’s length from government, intended to be an independent voice on agrifood policy issues.” Although it has a varied board of directors and advisory board that reflects farm lobby, agribusiness and academic interests, it still has not emerged as a go-to place for independent analysis.
And university faculties that traditionally gave tenure and resources to economic and political thinkers who could add some informed independent thought to a debate have largely been allowed to hollow out their stable of informed and credible agricultural policy analysts.
These thoughts were triggered in part by the recent news that University of Saskatchewan agricultural economist and former Saskatchewan deputy agriculture minister Hartley Furtan is ill.
When analysts and thinkers like Furtan, Daryl Kraft and Clay Gilson from the University of Manitoba, George Brinkman and T.K. Warley from the University of Guelph, among others, leave the fray through retirement, illness or death, who replaces them?
In most cases, the sad answer is: “No one.” Competent, credible and hard-working researchers and analysts continue to serve on university staffs, but their numbers, and therefore the ranges of opinion and perspective, are dwindling.
It leaves the debate over new policies and proper direction largely to those who are partisans in the middle of the fray, those in it to pursue a policy or ideological agenda or those with a self-interest agenda.
All of these are worthy and essential players in the farm policy debate.
But they also are limited and somewhat defined by their drive to reach their desired goal, whether it is the spending control and limited liability goals of bureaucratic designers, the program goals of recipient farmers or the ideological goals of some of the players.
The agricultural debate in the country is impoverished as a result.
