Canadian grain farmers who believe that sacrificing supply management import controls would increase export markets for grain are wrong, a prominent Canadian chicken producer said last week on Parliament Hill.
Ron O’Connor, an Ontario chicken and grain farmer, told the Senate agriculture committee Oct. 21 that export-oriented farmers should not be so quick to assume that undermining supply management in world trade talks would win Canadian exporters brownie points with other countries.
O’Connor, vice-chair of the National Farm Products Council that oversees supply management agencies, was reacting to suggestions from prairie Progressive Conservative senators that Canada’s efforts to defend supply management tariff protections hurt grain industry efforts to win greater access to foreign markets.
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“I have a hard time agreeing with the statement that supply management is doing anything detrimental to grain farmers,” O’Connor said, noting he is an important market for grain producers. “It is a misperception if anyone thinks that by getting rid of marketing boards, we will improve the grain industry in Canada. I do not believe that.”
Earlier, he had listened to Conservative senator Len Gustafson from Saskatchewan suggest the opposite.
“In Western Canada, there is a strong feeling that the protection of the marketing board penalizes the grain industry,” said the grain farmer and key western adviser under former prime minister Brian Mulroney.
“Again and again, the Americans have said to us ‘if you open the door to us in the marketing protected areas, we will open the door to grain’. Many people in Western Canada feel we are being penalized yet at the same time, I do not hear the marketing board people supporting grain producers or cattle producers.”
Two days later, grain and supply managed sectors presented their world trade perspectives to the House of Commons agriculture committee, but the debate was much less confrontational.
The Grain Growers of Canada lobby group told MPs that negotiations at recently unsuccessful World Trade Organization negotiations at Cancun, Mexico were positive.
An unapproved agricultural text circulated near the end of the meeting should be pursued because it offered some control of domestic and export subsidies and proposed significant cuts in protective domestic tariffs, said GGC president Ken Bee.
Dairy Farmers of Canada followed with a warning to MPs that while grain exporters may have felt they made progress, those proposed tariff cuts in the Cancun document would spell disaster for supply management.
“With regards to supply management … as far as we were concerned we were worse off than when we got into it,” said DFC executive director Richard Doyle.
