At a Parliament Hill news conference on Feb. 2, Colleen Ross held up a retail bag of rolled oats worth $3.40.
Ross, who produces grain, oilseeds and cattle near Iroquois, Ont., and is women’s vice-president of the National Farmers Union, said that price would translate into more than $3,000 per tonne for oats, yet farmers receive just $140 per tonne.
“There is not that much processing between oats and this product,” she said.
“I would like to know where all that money goes. It doesn’t come back to the farmer who grows the product.”
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Her appearance was billed as an explanation of “the causes of and solutions to the farm income crisis.”
Ross said the cause is agribusiness’s growing power to retain a large share of the food dollar through higher input prices and low commodity prices paid to farmers.
She said solutions include legislation to set a cost of production-based floor price for Canadian farm products, doing what can be done to reduce corporate power in the agri-food sector, reducing Canadian surplus production by idling land, concentrating more on serving the domestic market and pulling agriculture out of World Trade Organization rules.
Ross said WTO deals do little to help farmers, even though the value of exports has increased since free trade deals were signed. Export sales often are at a loss and farm income has fallen during the free trade era.
Besides, in the latest round of WTO negotiations that appears to be heading toward a conclusion within the next several years, both supply management and the Canadian Wheat Board are under attack.
“We are not anti-trade but there is a possibility for profitable trade agreements bilaterally rather than the WTO approach,” she said.
Liberal MP and former NFU president Wayne Easter is holding national hearings on the issue of chronically low and falling farm incomes, promising a report on causes and possible solutions by July. The federal government has promised action.
Ross presented the NFU perspective at one of Easter’s late-January hearings in eastern Ontario and while she does not hold out much hope that the hearings will produce creative solutions, she said Easter has put his reputation on the line.
“We can put his feet to the fire on this,” she said.
“What does Wayne want his legacy to farmers to be? But I am increasingly cynical. They have been hearing farmers tell them for years what the problem is and yet they continue to ask us what the problem is.”
Ross said the answer is to curb the power of the corporations in the food chain and to ensure farmers receive a greater share of the food dollar.
She illustrated the situation with a loaf of bread. The farmer share, if costs, labour and management are included, is one-quarter of one slice in a 19-slice loaf, Ross said.
“The politicians and bureaucrats and trade negotiators don’t understand,” she said. “I’m going to make it a bit easier for them to understand.”
