Farmer Carolyn McDonald is looking for a full-time job this winter.
She and her husband farm near Richard, Sask., and had been counting on a lentil crop to make them a profit this year. But the lentils got hit by disease and the outfitting business they run on the side wasn’t enough to keep the farm running.
“This year we have 1,100 acres of hobby farm – and we worked all year on it,” she said in an interview at the Canadian Farm Women’s Network conference in Saskatoon last weekend.
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Last year the McDonalds cut back 400 acres by giving up some rented land. This year she, and maybe her husband, will need another off-farm job.
McDonald is chair of the Sask-atchewan Women’s Agricultural Network, which organized this past weekend’s meeting of 125 farm women from across the country. A major issue for the women is the lack of support for farming. It’s a concern for McDonald, who is not encouraging either of her daughters to take up farming.
She worries that other than the agricultural community, no one is aware of the problem.
“We need to create an understanding across the country of the importance of agriculture. It is not just a farm problem and it has been happening for many years and it’s coming to a head.”
McDonald said if many young farmers are forced to quit, then the costs will be counted in human terms and not just dollars and cents.
Consumers can “pay now, or pay later in welfare cheques,” she said.
McDonald has done her part by speaking at farm conferences during the past two years and testified four months ago in front of the Liberal party’s task force on the West.
At the conference, she asked federal rural development minister Andrew Mitchell how the cabinet can say there is no money for farmers when there is a budget surplus.
“I asked him how he could sleep? I got five seconds of silence and then a non-answer I didn’t understand.”
McDonald knows farmers don’t count for many votes. That’s why the national conference was important “to create understanding and correct miscomprehensions” among farm women across Canada and to build allies.
Farmers need more friends, agreed social activist Maude Barlow, who spoke to the conference about the risks and opportunities in the World Trade Organization talks that opened in Seattle this week. Barlow told farm women that previous world trade talks pitted farmers against each other. Subsidies were supposed to be reduced, but the United States and European Union held onto theirs.
“The economic regulations under WTO are not designed for you or to aid farmers anywhere.”
Barlow told the women the concept of globalized agriculture is that no longer do farmers produce food for people. They are a cog in a corporate food-processing machine.
“The average North American plate of food has traveled over 1,500 miles. Each step a profit is taken off – that’s why farmers get so little.”
University of Saskatchewan economist Ken Rosaasan told the conference that wheat is 13 percent protein and 87 percent politics. He accused the federal government of using WTO “as a skirt to hide behind in revising domestic agricultural policies.”
He said farmers are not to blame for their trouble and used western grain freight rates as an example. The cost of moving grain used to average $3-$5 a tonne across the Prairies. After the government stopped paying the subsidy it jumped to $41.50 a tonne in Nipawin, Sask., and $26.60 a tonne in Red Deer.
This also helps explain why Alberta farmers have not been as vocal about their conditions since they pay half the rate of their eastern prairie counterparts, he said.
Nova Scotia delegate Marian Lucas-Jefferies said farmers are still divided “because we’re so preoccupied with putting a finger in the dike.”
