HALIFAX, N.S. – While prairie farmers and their politicians often
portray the region as the main potential victim of the United States
farm bill, Ontario agriculture minister Helen Johns has a distinctly
different view.
“We believe the farm bill has a large impact in Ontario,” she said.
Ontario’s corn, soybean, wheat and special crops producers all face the
prospect of lower returns because of American subsidies, she said.
While American subsidies are available to give U.S. producers a profit
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once they have captured their production costs from the market, Ontario
farmers are largely stuck with market returns.
“So Ontario farmers will be affected by trade injury as well,” said
Johns, appointed minister last winter.
She will be lobbying Ottawa to make sure Ontario receives its fair
share of the $600 million in transition funding due to be distributed
this year and again next year, to be sent largely to sectors and areas
with greatest needs. Ontario has promised to put up 40 percent to
Ottawa’s 60 percent.
Ontario argues that in addition to U.S. subsidy impacts, the province’s
fruit and vegetable industry has been hurt by drought.
But the longer-term and bigger threat to Ontario from the farm bill is
the provision that will impose mandatory country-of-origin labels on
imports beginning in 2004.
Johns said it could lead many of Ontario’s food processing and
manufacturing plants to move south, since the American market is their
main livelihood.
“We have a very large food industry in the province and the food
industry is very concerned,” she said. “They are worried about slippage
in the export market.”
And provincial officials are worried about investment flight south of
the border, with thousands of jobs at stake.
It has led the Ontario minister to demand that the federal government
take a more aggressive stand against the U.S. farm bill, and involve
the affected provinces more in developing strategy for a World Trade
Organization challenge.
“I am pushing for more involvement by the provinces because I think we
need a more aggressive stance,” said Johns. “I go so far as to say
maybe we shouldn’t be sending out our water and national resources if
we can’t do more for the agricultural community.”
Meanwhile, trade issues dominated discussions during the last few hours
of the federal-provincial agriculture ministers’ summer meeting June
27-28. In answer to provincial demands for a tougher stand by Ottawa,
federal minister Lyle Vanclief emerged to say he hopes mandatory
labelling never takes effect.
The bill approved by the U.S. government last spring establishes two
years of voluntary country-of-origin labelling before mandatory rules
kick in.
“In the farm bill, it is voluntary and they are getting under a lot of
pressure from all around the world,” said Vanclief.
