Canada’s largest farm lobby organization is warning federal and provincial ministers to avoid what they did in 2001 – create a new farm support program in defiance of farm leader warnings that it is flawed.
In November, federal and provincial agriculture ministers fly to Whitehorse for a meeting designed to approve and unveil key elements in a new Canadian farm business risk management suite of programs.
In summer 2001, ministers gathered in the same Yukon city to approve an agricultural policy framework that was a springboard for programs that farmers correctly predicted would not meet the need.
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Last week, the Canadian Federation of Agriculture and its provincial affiliates told governments they should step back from approving a new five-year set of programs that continue to have at their core the principles of the Canadian Agricultural Income Stabilization program that bases payouts on a percentage of historic average profit margins.
In the grains and oilseeds sector in particular, margins have been declining as prices decline and the effect is to have a program that offers increasingly tepid support.
“What they are proposing does not go anywhere near what they promised, which was to replace CAIS with a new program,” CFA president Bob Friesen said in a Sept. 1 interview. “They are calling it a new margin-based program but at its core, it is the same program with the same fundamental flaw.”
In Winnipeg, Keystone Agricultural Producers president David Rolfe said that slapping a new coat of paint on CAIS will not fix it.
“There’s no point spending good money after bad on a losing program,” he said in a Sept. 1 commentary. “No matter how much money flows through CAIS, it will never be enough because the program simply can’t deliver what farmers need.”
The Agricultural Producers’ Association of Saskatchewan echoed the complaint, arguing that CAIS does not compete with the benefits that flow to United States producers.
