Farmers don’t want income guarantees or social programs from the government, even if sometimes the help is needed, farm leader Geri Kamenz told a Senate committee studying rural poverty.
Specifically, the Ontario Federation of Agriculture president rejected an idea promoted throughout the hearings by Ontario Conservative senator Hugh Segal that government fund a guaranteed annual income for rural and farm families.
“I think a guaranteed farm income is an abject failure which will do more to create a welfare state than resolve the issue of rural poverty,” said Kamenz, who produces crops and hogs south of Ottawa.
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federal government proposed several months ago to increase the compensation rate from 80 to 90 per cent and double the maximum payment from $3 million to $6 million
He said the Farm Family Options program created last year by the Conservatives to target money to low-income farm families was “a resounding success” by triggering payments to 17,000 farm families in the first of two years.
“However, we should not confuse that with a farm income support program,” said the farm leader. “It was an excellent social program but what we are trying to do is create opportunities for agriculture to provide real services and real opportunities for profitability.”
His comments to the Senate committee meeting in the eastern Ontario community of Athens echoed comments to the House of Commons agriculture committee a week earlier from a Saskatchewan farmer talking about farm safety net programs.
Barry Reisner from Limerick, Sask., past-president of the Canadian Seed Growers’ Association, told MPs that producers do not want programs designed merely to prop them up.
“Our farmers don’t want to be dependent on government,” he said. “They’ve been in that situation for a significant number of years now and they don’t want to be there. They want to get off the dole and they want to get out and do their business and be profitable and be enterprising and run profitable businesses.”
Kamenz said a decision by governments to compensate farmers for their ecological services could be a major part of the solution, without the stigma of it being a social program.
