EDMONTON ( Staff) – Canada’s farm safety net programs will likely be tailored to each province’s needs with caps on payouts to maintain equity for farmers across the country.
There are still several proposals being written for a whole farm program but flexibility is necessary because production methods, levels of risk and crops vary widely across the country, said Ron Leonhardt, president of Unifarm.
“How do you provide a program for a guy who’s growing grain on the Prairies and a guy who’s growing apples in British Columbia?” asked Leonhardt, a long-standing member of the national safety nets committee.
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“Producers in Alberta seem to have indicated that they were more favorable to programs that were lower cost and provided less support,” said Leonhardt.
In Alberta he thinks GATT 70, reformed crop insurance and a basic Net Income Stabilization Account will be available to farmers.
“It won’t be as much support as was there in the past, but it will be lower cost to everybody,” he said in an interview.
Out of GRIP
Alberta agriculture minister Walter Pazskowski told Unifarm that farmers can’t be totally unprotected and he wants to see a new program in place for the 1995 tax year. He spoke at the Unifarm general meeting in Edmonton Jan. 11.
Pazskowski wants Alberta out of the Gross Revenue Insurance Plan without penalty and started negotiating with Ottawa the first week of January to make it a voluntary program for 1995.
Jack Wilkinson, president of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, said the federal minister of agriculture will likely put dollars into a basic NISA and allow regional programs to meet the needs of the provinces.
“Where it becomes a problem, is you get variations on the border,” Wilkinson said. For instance, farmers in Saskatchewan and Manitoba may grow the same crops but under provincial programs could receive different levels of support.
“If they’re all different, it creates a lot of problems.”
He suggests caps on provincial programs to prevent inequities. He is also concerned about countervails on commodity specific programs and said GATT 70 could be at risk.
GATT 70 doesn’t offer a high enough level of support, he suggested. However, the program is still being re-worked to make it more acceptable.
It is a made-in-Alberta program that will offer farm support if a farmer’s income drops to 70 percent of his personal average income.
