IT IS understandable that when Canadian farmers train their sights on governments, it is governments in Ottawa or Edmonton or Quebec City, nearby governments that set the rules and dole out the assistance, that are visible and constitutionally responsible.
They look to national or provincial farm groups to influence those governments.
But the reality of the modern globalized world is that the actions and decisions of international bodies also have a profound effect on the fate of Canadian and world farmers. It is within the context of those international decisions that national and provincial governments operate.
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Negotiations at the World Trade Organization that could establish limits on domestic farm programs are an obvious example. Others are less visible but just as important.
At the Paris-based Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, for example, a decision that the difference between domestically set, supply managed prices and so-called world prices really is a farm subsidy has substantially increased the amount that the world considers to be Canada’s farm subsidy level.
At the Washington-based World Bank and International Monetary Fund, conservative economists in the 1980s and 1990s decided that what ailed developing country economies was too much government and collective action and too little free market capitalism.
These bodies proceeded to tell many debt-ridden countries that funds would be available only if they sharply curtailed support for industry and farmers and opened up their economies.
In a country like Uganda, for example, the result was to destroy what little help farmers were receiving.
“It was all free competition and no place for people working together in the economy,” Uganda Co-operative Alliance general manager Leonard Msemakweli told a visiting reporter. “It was a disaster for farmers.”
There are many other international bodies, mainly working under the radar, whose decisions profoundly affect policies that determine the fate of world farmers. National farmers’ organizations have no standing or regular presence there.
So who at least tries to speak for farmers when these decisions are being considered?
Enter the International Federation of Agricultural Producers, a Paris-based federation of scores of national farm groups that tries to stretch its thin resources to let international bodies know there are, or ought to be, farmer interests to be considered.
IFAP gets little attention. That’s a pity because for all its limitations, it is often the only farmer voice in international rooms filled with pinstriped suits and conservative economists.
IFAP’s just-retired president Jack Wilkinson of Canada travelled hundreds of thousands of kilometres to remind these international gnomes that real farmers producing real food are affected by their decisions.
New IFAP president Ajay Vashee from Zambia says his goal is to work with members to “create a strategy to solve the world food crisis, help farmers to develop and get paid for the ecosystem services they provide humanity, address agriculture and climate change and evaluate sustainable bio-energy production.”
It is an ambitious promise but we ought to wish him luck. With or without farmer input, decisions will be made.
Bruce Dyck, Terry Fries, Barb Glen, D’Arce McMillan and Ken Zacharias collaborate in the writing of Western Producer editorials.
