The federal politician in charge of getting to the bottom of why farm incomes have been steadily declining for a quarter century says he already knows the answer.
Solutions will be more difficult to find, says MP Wayne Easter, parliamentary secretary to agriculture minister Andy Mitchell. The minister has assigned him the farm income file and Easter plans an interim report by summer.
“In my view, it comes down to farmer power in the marketplace and we don’t have it,” Easter said in a Dec. 16 interview. “So what do we do to fix that problem, either as a nation or globally, separate from the WTO (World Trade Organization)?”
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Easter plans a whirlwind tour of Canada in January to begin gauging farmer opinion.
Hearings will be held in Western Canada for a week beginning Jan. 17 in Fort St. John, B.C. and winding through Abbotsford, Calgary, Brandon and Saskatoon before heading east.
He said the hearings, four hours in each city, are meant to look at core causes and possible solutions, rather than to hear more problem stories.
“I know we have a tremendous problem at the farm production level so I don’t want these hearings to be a repetition of that,” he said. “And I don’t want these hearings to become a detailed analysis of the problems in CAIS (Canadian Agricultural Income Stabilization). There are other forums for that.”
Meanwhile, Mitchell and Easter concede that it could be politically perilous to raise farmer expectations of a quick solution to the low-income problem.
Mitchell said the solution could be years away.
“In all likelihood, it won’t get accomplished in my mandate and it may not get accomplished in my successor or his or her successor’s mandate,” Mitchell said. “But I can tell you one thing. If we don’t begin to deal with this, if we don’t start to identify the causes, if we don’t start to identify some of the things we can do to address it, then it won’t get addressed.”
The minister said fear of not meeting expectations is no reason not to tackle the issue.
“As a politician or a political leader, to simply shy away from doing something because people may not be satisfied with everything you do, you would be frozen in time. This is a real issue for producers and I feel an obligation as minister of agriculture and agri-food to deal with this.”
Despite more than $4 billion in farm aid and program payments last year, the industry still lost money, Easter said.
“There is a recognition in government that this cannot go on forever so there is something structurally wrong with agriculture,” he said. “Finally, there is recognition in Ottawa at the government level that this is not farmers with a hand out, but a serious problem in the industry that we have to address. That is positive.”
Easter cited a recent analysis by University of Guelph economist George Brinkman that compared 1975 farm returns calculated in 2003 dollars Ñ $3.3 billion in net income with a debt load of $7.8 billion Ñ to last year’s dismal results Ñ a net income loss from market returns of $2 billion (before program payments) with a debt load of $47.7 billion.
