New Brunswick hog producer Stephen Moffatt is exactly the kind of farmer the Canadian Agricultural Income Stabilization program should help.
Hog prices bounce up and down, creating a cyclical industry that creates a profit reference point for a historic-margin program. And CAIS is whole farm, which protects the industry from commodity-specific supports that can lead to countervail charges.
“In hogs, our income swings are devastating and CAIS clearly has helped some,” he said from his Penobsquis, N.B., farm.
But Moffatt also can rhyme off the problems with CAIS.
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“I am selling hogs now at less than it costs to produce them and yet even if I qualified for a CAIS payment, and there is no guarantee I would, I would not get it until next year at the earliest and my bills are sitting on my table right now.”
Farmers across Canada complain about the program’s complexity, unpredictability and unfairness.
Those complaints and more are why agriculture minister Chuck Strahl says he wants to negotiate with the provinces to fulfil an election pledge to replace CAIS with a new stabilization program and a stand-alone disaster program.
“I don’t have a date on when I think this can be done, but I have said I want it ASAP so I’m hoping it’s for the next crop year,” he said last week. “I just don’t think it can be tinkered with. Every part has been a problem as far as I can see so collectively, people have basically got it chalked up in the abomination category because of the collective errors and problems.”
The minister faces some skeptics and some opponents in his bid to scrap CAIS.
Provincial governments say they like the principles of the program and want them to be the core of any future scheme. These include some of the features farmers find most vexing – late payments, a complex reference margin formula and whole-farm calculations.
“After all the work that went into it, I think we got the fundamentals right and I’m hearing that the United States is looking at it as a model for whole-farm programming,” said Saskatchewan agriculture minister Mark Wartman. “If we scrap it and try to come up with something better, we’ll come back with NAIS. Canadian will become national. That’s all.”
However, he wants Saskatchewan’s share of the costs reduced in any new program.
In Ottawa, former House of Commons agriculture committee chair Paul Steckle is another skeptic of radical change.
“I think CAIS, whatever new name they give it, will be around a lot longer than I am,” said the five-term Liberal MP last week.
Still, critics insist the CAIS design was flawed from the day in 2003 that the program took effect over the protests of farmers and provinces like Saskatchewan.
University of Manitoba professor Ed Tyrchniewicz, who chaired a review of the agricultural policy framework, said it tries to combine long-term stabilization with short-term disaster coverage.
“When you mix long term and short term, you achieve neither,” he said.
National Farmers Union president Stewart Wells insists the fatal flaw is that CAIS assumes a marketplace that occasionally returns profits to farmers and that will create a profit margin to be stabilized. In fact, he said, market returns in many sectors have been in a slump for years and a marketplace dominated by multinational corporations is not functioning for farmers.
All of which leaves Ontario farmer Geri Kamenz wistful about the day four years ago when his Ottawa-area farm was used as a backdrop for the flashy prime ministerial announcement of a new farm policy.
“There was so much hope that day,” he said. “It has been such a disappointment.”
