Returning president | Canadian Federation of Agriculture president Ron Bonnett sets agenda for second term
Re-elected Canadian Federation of Agriculture president Ron Bonnett said he has clear goals for his next two-year term as head of Canada’s largest general farm organization:
- Work to “build consensus on the issues.”
- Demonstrate to farmers and their organizations “the value of the work we do on environment, regulatory reform, the taxation file and others.”
- Pull together a national food strategy that the CFA has worked on for years.
“We have a target we can work toward and the means to get there,” Bonnett said Feb. 27 after being acclaimed to a second two-year term as president.
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The northern Ontario cattle producer took over the presidency in June 2010 after former president Laurent Pellerin accepted a government appointment in Ottawa.
Turning the idea of a national food strategy into a concrete overarching government policy remains an elusive goal.
The CFA, the Conference Board of Canada and the Canadian Agricultural Policy Institute have spent years working on this issue, but there were indications last week that food policy is not on the federal government’s political horizon.
Agriculture minister Gerry Ritz told the CFA annual convention that the government remains interested, but nothing is imminent.
“I have not seen a magic bullet on the national food strategy,” he said.
He would not be pinned down when pressed about when the Conservatives would implement a national food strategy as promised by all political parties in the 2011 election.
“I don’t have a timeline,” he said.
Ritz later told reporters that many of the discussions about a national food strategy have been high level and vague.
“I don’t see anything tangible at this point.”
Winning support for a national strategy has been a priority for the CFA for the past half decade.
Bonnett also said the organization must do a better job selling the value of a national general farm voice to farmers. Four members have dropped out in the last year, the most significant being the Canadian Pork Council.
He argued that part of the issue is the current boom in most commodity prices, which diminishes the value of political lobbying in some farmers’ minds.
Farm income is high, and it is difficult to convince farmers to “go to a rally calling for tweaking of programs 10 years out when conditions may be worse.”
“We have to energize people in a different way in these different times,” he said.
