Canadian farmers want to be in the driver’s seat of environmental policy development, not sitting in the back bleating “are we there yet?”
That’s what farmer representatives said during and after a national conference on environmental goods and services held in Winnipeg.
Farmers have been trying to build programs that will pay them to protect the environment. They don’t want their efforts to be nullified by governments.
“We have pushed hard for this,” said Ian Wishart, vice-president of Keystone Agricultural Producers, speaking after the conference conclusion.
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“We’re not going to give up.”
Around the world, governments and farmers have been developing programs that will pay producers to protect riverbanks, erosion-prone areas, biodiversity and sensitive grasslands. While most subsidies to agriculture are still paid out to producers based on their production or acreage, more money is being targeted to environmental protection.
There are a number of ways to reward farmers for protecting sensitive environmental situations on their land, but farmers at the conference seemed unanimous in preferring incentives to regulations.
“Using the regulatory approach is the wrong attitude,” said Elbert van Donkersgoed, the strategic policy adviser for the Christian Farmers Federation of Ontario.
“That makes the environment a cost of doing business. The way to be is to have society give us a reason to invest in that environmental good or service, and there should be a return on investment. That’s a whole different mindset that needs a whole different set of programming.”
Keystone has been working for more than six years to establish programs that will reward farmers for protecting the environment. Wishart said a number of pilot programs across the country should be ready to run in 2007, and if they work successfully, they could be enlarged to more acres.
But Wishart is alarmed at what he says is an attitude among agriculture bureaucrats that any programs should come from the federal bureaucracy rather than from farmers.
“Their attitude seems to be ‘go away and we’ll come back to you and tell you when we’re ready to regulate you,’ ” said Wishart.
Van Donkersgoed said farmers need to keep up their efforts to design programs that reward environmental efforts so that a more punitive, regulatory approach won’t be taken. Right now federal officials appear to favour continuing on with approaches that only partially compensate or even penalize the farmer for having environmentally sensitive land.
“We’re back at square 1 (compared to more progressive European nations),” said Van Donkersgoed.
“We’re still having to get rid of the mindset that the environment is a cost rather than an opportunity. If farmers get paid for providing service, they’ll deliver far more than the government could ever seize from us through regulation.”
