Less than halfway through the five-year Growing Forward policy framework, federal and provincial agriculture ministers are to meet in February to discuss whether its safety net programs are effective.
Ministers are scheduled to meet in Toronto to review details of a six-month analysis of how well business risk management programs like AgriStability and AgriInvest are performing for farmers.
Farm lobbyists aren’t expecting much.
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“I think it will be a time for ministers to put their cards on the table but I am not hearing of any big announcements or decisions coming,” Canadian Federation of Agriculture vice-president Ron Bonnett said in late December.
Richard Phillips, executive director of Grain Growers of Canada, concurred.
“I don’t expect announcements but agreement on areas that need more study,” he said. “They may also agree to develop better performance indicators to assess the success of the programs. I hope they do.”
The February gathering was prompted by pressure at last summer’s ministers’ meeting from Ontario minister Leona Dombrowsky for a business risk management program review.
“I think there is a general consensus that we have heard from our stakeholders that AgriStability was not doing for them what it needed to do,” Dombrowsky said at the end of the meeting in Niagara-on-the-Lake.
AgriStability inherited from its predecessor program the reference margin-based system that has a producer compare current program year margins against average margins during the past five years with the highest and lowest years dropped.
Dombrowsky said she has been hearing from producers.
“All of us agree that we want a tool that is going to work for the people it is intended to work for.”
But she likely will face resistance from federal minister Gerry Ritz, who argues the program is better than the Canadian Agriculture Income Stability program it replaced and should be given more time to prove itself.
Many other provincial ministers will be reluctant to approve changes that could end up costing them more money.
2009 was a year of increasing criticism of the existing safety net programs and growing evidence that programs triggered when income falls below historic average levels do not help sectors in long periods of poor income.
“The margin approach simply isn’t working for large areas of the industry,” said Bonnett. “Many sectors in the middle of long declines essentially do not have historic margins that will trigger significant payments now.”
The former Ontario Federation of Agriculture president said there are two key issues ministers should look at – how to fix the margin problem and whether to stay with the whole farm approach or move to more commodity specific programming.
Phillips said Grain Growers has suggested governments offer farmers a choice of the current margin triggered coverage or a program based on stabilizing gross income.
But he said Agriculture Canada numbers suggest existing programs are not performing as poorly as critics suggest. They indicate that for the 2008 year, AgriInvest paid out to 129,000 farmers while CAIS would have helped 45,000 at the top end of losses.
“I think we need to better understand how the programs are working before we start to change them,” he said. “The critics get heard but there is a silent majority who benefit from the programs and don’t speak up.”
