Wayne Easter hardly needed more pressure as he prepares a report for federal and provincial agriculture ministers on how to stop the slide in farm incomes.
Last week’s release from Statistics Canada on 2004 farm incomes shows that once again, the only thing standing between most farmers and a massive negative income was record program payments.
“The numbers are better for last year but they are far from great and the problem remains that the market is not returning enough to make farming profitable,” the Prince Edward Island MP and former president of the National Farmers Union said May 27.
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So is there a way to get off the treadmill of tax dollars filling the hole left by market return shortfalls?
“I think there is an answer. There has to be an answer,” he said. “It is to rebalance the balance of power in the marketplace.”
If he has new ideas on how to accomplish that, Easter is saving them for his July report to ministers.
He said the solution is to make sure that market power tools such as supply management agencies are not lost in trade talks. However, that model of protected markets and production controls is not appropriate for all sectors, including those that depend on export sales.
“But somehow, we have to take on the multinationals that dominate the market,” said Easter.
Al Mussell, senior research associate at the George Morris Centre in Guelph, Ont., said the real answer is to convince more farmers to become a part of value chain agreements that give them contracts both with input suppliers and buyers that provide returns to keep them viable.
“I think it will take a willingness to work with other people in the chain,” Mussell said.
He argued that dependence on government support is at best a temporary measure and an impediment to change.
National Farmers Union president Stewart Wells from Swift Current, Sask., scoffs at that proposed solution as long as farmers are the economically weak link.
“Farmers will be chewed up in the gears of the value chain and spit out one after another,” he said.
Wells’s answer for getting off the government support treadmill is to support and strengthen orderly marketing and to reduce the government obsession of considering increased exports as the basis of the farm economy.
For Canadian Federation of Agriculture president Bob Friesen, farmer participation in contracts with buyers and suppliers is “a glib answer” to a deeper problem. Until ways are found to rebalance market power, governments must be ready to support the sector, he said.
“We are a long way away from governments being able to back away from safety nets and being able to back away from ad hoc payments.”
