OTTAWA (Staff) – One of Canada’s most influential farm leaders is warning that 1996 is the year that could make or break agricultural single-desk marketing systems.
It is time, said Canadian Federation of Agriculture president Jack Wilkinson, for defenders of single- desk marketing to “put a strategy together, a campaign” to save the system or they could lose it. “There is a war of the heart under way.”
He said market and political forces are mounting a strong challenge to the system.
The Canadian Wheat Board, central desk selling for hogs and even supply management are under threat, he said.
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Wilkinson bemoaned what he sees as a weak response so far from defenders of monopoly marketing. He vows to be a more active fighter in the new year.
“I think defenders of the system are losing the PR battle”, he said in a year-end interview. “Hell, some of them have not even joined the battle. It is not up to the wheat board to justify itself. Farmers who believe in it should be doing that.”
Wilkinson said if marketing boards and central desk sellers are dismantled or undermined, “it will be a 50-year struggle to build them again.”
The battle over marketing is just one of the policy and program issues facing the farm community in the new year, he said.
After a year like 1995, when prairie farmers lost the grain transportation subsidy, east and west coast farmers lost feed freight assistance, the government announced plans to privatize the St. Lawrence Seaway and deregulate the railways and Agriculture Canada spending plans were slashed by several hundred million dollars, farmers might wish for a more serene 1996.
But the CFA president predicted serenity is not in the cards.
It will be a year, he said, in which:
- The supply management system faces an American trade challenge to its tariff protections and also by domestic pressures to become more market oriented.
- The prairie provinces, in the midst of a review of crop insurance plans, try to reduce their crop insurance spending.
- The national farm safety net is challenged by Alberta’s insistence that it has the right to opt out of whole-farm protection if it considers the support level too rich or accessible.
- Ontario and Quebec governments slash farm spending as part of provincial efforts to reduce deficits.
