EDMONTON – Western representation on the Canadian Federation of Agriculture is diluted, rendering absent the views of farmers from two of Canada’s largest agriculture-producing provinces.
For CFA president Jack Wilkinson, the survival of general farm groups in Western Canada is a concern.
British Columbia, Alberta and Manitoba have general farm organizations and all are struggling for survival. Saskatchewan has no such organization. This year Alberta’s whole farm organization, Unifarm, couldn’t afford to pay its CFA dues.
No easy answer
There’s no simple answer to what is going wrong for these groups, said Wilkinson.
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Farmers are no longer a homogeneous group. They have learned to make rapid management decisions because of shifting world trade policy, changes in government and regulation reforms.
In some cases, farm organizations including the CFA haven’t been able to move as quickly as some events unfolded.
“We’ve been working on what we thought were the traditional issues and these changes have taken place,” he said.
“We are moving to bigger and more specialized farms where people feel they have the capacity to handle these problems themselves,” Wilkinson said.
Governments say they want a unified farm voice to tell them how to deal with issues, but needs differ from farm to farm. For example, large specialized farms have different expectations of an income safety net than small or developing operations, he said. Further, each issue on the CFA agenda is specialized and requires research to handle it properly for farmers.
It’s almost impossible to have enough specialists to deal with each concern, Wilkinson said.
“You can’t have a generalist in the office anymore like you used to. This is a complicated business which has major trade issues, major consumer issues involved. We try and be experts in some areas.”
