Focus on Sabbatical has gone on sabbatical.
The non-profit corporation that wants to boost grain prices by convincing farmers around the world to cut production has run out of money and the organization’s leaders have run out of energy and patience.
“We’re pretty much dormant,” the organization’s founder Ken Goudy said in an interview from his Melfort, Sask., home.
“I’m not willing to spend any more of my money to try and convince farmers they’ve got a problem.”
The group cancelled its annual spring meeting and directors are no longer travelling to promote the idea.
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Focus’s plan is based on the premise that the cause of low prices is overproduction and the only solution is for farmers to band together to manage production.
It proposed that grain and oilseed growers in Canada, the United States, Brazil, Argentina and Australia take one-third of their land, or about 150 million acres, out of production one year out of every four or five.
That would result in a production cut of about eight billion bushels of wheat, feed grains and oilseeds, and would trigger a doubling in prices.
A year ago, at Focus on Sabbatical’s annual meeting, Goudy described 2003-04 as the group’s make or break year.
He said it was crucial to sell more memberships to raise operating funds and to show governments and farm groups that producers were serious.
Focus charged a one-time membership fee of $250 and had about 3,500 members in Canada and 600 in the United States.
But when few memberships were sold, the writing was on the wall.
“I’ve pushed farmers and they have pretty much said ‘look, we’re not interested’,” said Goudy.
“If this thing is going to do anything, then farmers have to start pushing me.”
Grant Jackson, an organization director from Galahad, Alta., and a promoter since the organization’s inception four years ago, said he reluctantly agrees with the decision to wind things down.
“I’m disappointed, but we have no choice,” he said. “We just didn’t get the support that we needed to make it go.”
The plan proposed a system of contracts, cash deposits and trust accounts that would allow the production cuts to be announced a year in advance, thus driving up prices and providing farmers with money ahead of harvest and reducing individual risk.
Farmers would lose their deposit if they didn’t cut production and would get their deposit back if the announcement didn’t produce the desired price response.
Jackson said the plan would have worked if enough farmers had joined, but that didn’t happen.
“I think for some the project was just too big and they couldn’t get their mind around the idea that a bunch of farmers would do this,” he said, adding that maybe farmers “aren’t hurting enough” to make it work.
Goudy said farmers in Western Canada, in Saskatchewan in particular, had the most to gain from Focus’s proposal, which makes the failure to attract more members even more frustrating.
It’s clear that the much ballyhooed goal of diversification and value-added isn’t the solution to the farm income crisis, he said, nor is simply growing and exporting more raw product.
“If things aren’t serious enough at this point to convince Saskatchewan farmers that you have to manage production, then I’m not sure who you’ll ever convince.”
University of Saskatchewan economist Ken Rosaasen told last year’s Focus on Sabbatical annual meeting that while a production cut of the magnitude proposed would boost prices, there would be problems getting farmers to sign on and problems preventing others from boosting production to take advantage of price rises that occur.
Jackson said he hopes Focus will remain in existence in some form.
“I think it’s a tremendous idea and I still hope that down the road a few years we can get this up and running again,” he said.
