Residents of Arborg, Man., are beginning to feel there’s one set of rules for them and another set of rules for the rest of Canada.
Farmers in the region have suffered crop failures for three consecutive years because of excessive rainfall across a large swath of Manitoba’s northern Interlake.
The economic impact on Arborg has been immense, said grain farmer Kyle Foster.
The local hardware store recently closed and Feed Rite announced in June that it’s shutting down its mill in Arborg, putting 15 people out of work.
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“It’s common sense that we’re not growing any grain in our area,” said Foster, a district director with Keystone Agricultural Producers.
“So they’re hauling all the grain in and making the feed here. Well, they can make the feed someplace else and haul the feed in (to the Interlake).”
Farmers had a good crop in the ground in 2008 but couldn’t harvest it because heavy rain made fields impassable.
Approximately 200,000 acres in the northern Interlake were unseeded the following year because cropland was too saturated for planting.
This year, relentless rainfall since the middle of May drowned 50 percent of the crop.
Foster said that despite the dire conditions of the last three years, locals couldn’t convince governments that a recovery program was necessary.
However, when other parts of the Prairies were hammered by rain this spring, he added, an aid package was announced for excess moisture and flooded acres.
“Where was this program three years ago?” Foster said, referring to the $450 million federal-provincial AgriRecovery program announced in early July.
“A lot of these (other) producers have had margins in the past…. They have had good crops until this point. Now the government comes forth with a program. We’ve been in this situation for three years now and we couldn’t get a program. So why do we differ from the rest of Canada?… We do feel that we’ve been treated as second class citizens.”
Foster proposed a resolution at KAP’s general council in Brandon last week asking the provincial and federal governments to make the AgriRecovery program retroactive to 2008 and 2009.
