VICTORIA – Corky Evans, British Columbia’s new agriculture minister, wears a scar on his face that is a lingering memory of one of his real-life brushes with farming.
He is a logger by profession but as a rural kid in the Nelson area, he did farm chores.
“This scar, that’s my only agriculture background,” he said ruefully last week during a pause in the federal-provincial agriculture ministers’ conference. “That’s from the last pig I ever killed. I shot the pig, dragged him over and slit his throat and he kicked me in the face.”
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Call it Corky’s revenge. In June, he took over the cabinet job that oversees all the pigs in the province, as well as the rest of B.C.’s diverse food sector.
Evans, 48, inherits the job just as he sees a changing, more positive attitude developing about agriculture. It is losing its image as a protected subsidy pit and is being seen as a growing contributor to the economy.
In part, he sees it as a reflection of farmers’ ability to adapt. He speaks with admiration of his farm constituents in the Nelson-Creston riding he has represented since 1991.
“The farming community I have found to be more articulate about what is going on in the world than any other community I represent,” he said.
Seeking new markets
In part, he sees it as fallout from the fact that British Columbia farmers have become more outward looking, more market oriented.
Evans, a New Democrat, shies away from endorsing the North American Free Trade Agreement as a good thing for his sector.
But it is clear he approves of the changes brought by trade deals and declining protectionism.
“I think comprehending the global market and the need to compete with excellence has been good for agriculture.”
In fact, the traditional attempt to protect farmers from competition by guaranteeing them cost-of-production and preserving the domestic market for them “really ripped off the farming community.”
It left them with little chance for growth and dependent on the whims of politics and economists with their cost formulas, said Evans. Now that farmers see the world as their market, industry attitudes have changed and society looks at food production in a different way, he said.
“That vibrancy is really turning agriculture around to the point where I would predict in five years time, colleges will be stuffed with young people wanting to see this as their profession.”
