SASKATOON — Canada shouldn’t rush into wholesale changes to its farm programs just because of the new General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, says a farm policy analyst.
It’s simply not possible yet to know how the new trade deal will affect existing farm programs, said Grace Skogstad, so farmers and government should wait and see how the new deal develops.
“People should look very carefully at what’s actually in the GATT, because it may not require the kind of fundamental changes in agriculture policy, at least in the medium term, that some people think,” said Skogstad, a political scientist at the University of Toronto.
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The fact that reductions in export subsidies on grain are phased in over a number of years means there is a lot of time to develop policies to help farmers adjust to the new world trade rules, she said.
It’s also unclear exactly what changes will have to be made by supply-managed sectors.
Moving too quickly could lead to a repeat of the farm safety net review, which resulted in the seriously flawed GRIP and NISA programs.
“I think most people will tell you we hurried too much on the grain safety nets, even people who were part of the process,” said Skogstad.
She said the previous Progressive Conservative government used the prospect of a new GATT to justify deregulation and free-market-oriented policies that were in reality being driven by ideology and fiscal restraint.
In her speech to the conference, Skogstad said a major legacy of the Mulroney government is an undermining of the historical support among prairie farmers for a “collectivist” approach to solving problems.
“Tory rhetoric for nine years stressed the need for government to get out of the marketplace and the need for the individual to be more self-reliant and the industry to be more responsive to market signals,” she said.
That worked to undermine the traditional majority view in Western Canada that markets aren’t always free and fair, and there was a role for government to provide farmers with “countervailing power” through such things as single-desk selling and supply management.
The Conservatives’ success is evident in the debate over continental barley marketing, the apparent willingness of farmers to pay a greater share of the safety net bill and, ironically, the rise of the Reform Party.
And one way they were able to do that was by convincing farmers of the inevitability of the changes they were promoting, due to fiscal pressures from foreign bankers and the effect of GATT and North American free trade.
“Just the prospect of a new GATT affected agricultural policy making in Canada in a big way.”
She said the new Liberal government seems less driven by ideology and more interested in “consensus-building.” But external pressures like U.S. protectionism and fiscal restraint will still be a major influence in farm policy, she added.
