Canadian Federation of Agriculture president Bob Friesen says he is baffled by a recent farm poll that showed as many as 30 percent of farmers feel no farm group represents them.
In Alberta and Saskatchewan, it was worse Ñ 40 percent or more felt unrepresented in farm policy debates, although pollster Ipsos-Reid cautioned that smaller sample sizes in those provinces meant an accuracy rate of plus or minus 10 percent.
Still, the polls showed that in most provinces, farmer loyalty to a lobby group was scattered and many felt left out.
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Friesen said farm groups affiliated with the CFA spent a lot of time helping to develop details of the federal government’s agricultural policy framework. He said the lobby effort resulted in making flawed programs somewhat less flawed.
“I think that has been incredibly important for farmers,” Friesen said.
“It is disconcerting that farmers don’t recognize that and aren’t aware of it. We need to do a much better job communicating what we do because there is an incredible amount of energy and time spent fighting for farmers here in Ottawa, fighting for farmers at the provincial level. Somehow they have to be told that.”
He said part of the problem is farmers’ inability to measure the impact on their bottom line of changes in policy that farm lobbyists influence. Since the original policy did not take effect, farmers have no way of knowing the impact of the influence.
“Measuring the lobby impact at the farm level definitely is a problem,” he said.
“And it may also be a frustration at the farm level that they don’t think governments are listening and so they respond by saying nobody is fighting for us or if they are, they aren’t effective.”
The late January Ipsos-Reid poll of 875 farmers, considered accurate within 3.3 percentage points 19 times out of 20 nationally, suggested as many as one in three farmers in Canada cannot readily pick a farm group that best represents them.
