The National Farmers Union is asking federal and provincial governments to rethink their hell-bent support for more liberalized agricultural trade.
NFU president Nettie Wiebe said July 19 her organization is not anti-trade, but remains skeptical of the political enthusiasm for new trade goals and more liberalized trade rules.
She said federal and provincial agriculture ministers, who last week endorsed an aggressive goal of expanding trade by as much as 80 percent during the next eight years, should consider stepping off the bandwagon.
“Trade has more than doubled in the past decade and yet net farm income is stagnant or down,” she said from her farm at Laura, Sask.
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“Anecdotally, I hear a lot of distress.”
The NFU sent a brief to the ag ministers’ meeting urging Canada to lobby to have agricultural trade taken out of the next round of world trade talks, beginning late next year.
“Recent trade agreements have provided few benefits for farmers,” said an NFU statement. “They have embattled and weakened Canada’s orderly marketing and supply management institutions, which increase and stabilize farmers’ incomes and give them power in a marketplace increasingly dominated by huge agri-business corporations.”
But Canada has endorsed new agricultural trade talks and Wiebe said she expects ag trade will remain on the World Trade Organization agenda.
In that case, Canada should work with other like-minded countries to develop trade rules that take into account social and cultural concerns, she said.
“This is not a far-out idea,” said Wiebe. “I think a lot of countries are far less enthusiastic about the benefits of liberalized trade as the primary goal than they were even a decade ago.”
She said European, Latin American, developing world and even some American farm groups now see the need to support trade policies that allow farmers to stay on the land and do not make all other issues subservient to economic goals.
These trade goals would include keeping food production in the hands of family and peasant farms, making access to food a priority, and making sure farmers receive a “fair and adequate return.”
Wiebe said the ministers’ enthusiasm for expanding trade as a goal for the industry suggests they do not appreciate farmer sentiment and actual conditions.
Make little deals
She said the Canadian approach in the last trade talks was to accept the principles of free trade and then try to win “footnotes” offering some protection to Canadian sectors not enthusiastic about open borders.
The result has been a weakening of supply management and challenges to the Canadian Wheat Board and other central-desk selling agencies, she said.
“That has not worked well and I suspect it will work even less well if we try it again,” said the NFU president. “I am not seeing a lot of cheer among farmers at the prospect that we do twice as much of the same, since the same has not worked for many farmers in the past decade.”
