The Alberta government will support the continuing fight for dual marketing of wheat and barley, it announced in its three-year agriculture plan.
“We are still pushing and working off the basis that the majority of producers want choice,” said Ray Bassett, assistant deputy minister of agriculture.
The provincial government also plans to continue support for two ongoing court cases trying to get greater marketing choices for farmers, said Bassett.
It’s all part of the agriculture department’s new three-year business plan to guide the department until 2000.
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One major focus is more emphasis on research, he said.
The plan directs the department to take on several tasks:
- Work with the newly established agriculture value-added corporation to encourage long-term growth and development of food and fibre sectors.
- Support research and market development for primary and value-added industry.
- Reduce crop insurance premiums by implementing a new crop insurance program. In the first 50 percent of coverage the government will pay 80 percent of the premiums to get more farmers using the insurance.
It’s a move to a type of insurance used in Saskatchewan and Manitoba where crop insurance is more of a risk management tool.
- Continue with the Farm Income Disaster Program. Last year they paid out $60 million mostly to northeastern Alberta farmers for the 1995 drought.
- Implement a new provincial environmentally sustainable agriculture program to replace the federal environmentally sustainable agriculture program. Money is typically used by service boards for demonstrations and on-site research.
- Continue to press to allow farmers to sell wheat and malting barley outside the Canadian Wheat Board.
- Plan and build an advanced cereal crop research facility in Lacombe that will simulate a growing season in a fraction of the time.
- Negotiate the transfer of responsibility for provincial food inspection to the new national food inspection agency.
Since 1992 the department has cut spending by 45.9 percent or $237 million. The business plan calls for another $19 million of cuts by 2000, bringing the total cuts to the department to 49.7 percent since 1992.
