MOOSE JAW, Sask. – Effective agricultural policy has to come from the grassroots, farm leaders said at a conference here last week.
As farm organizations and individuals work to develop what they think is appropriate and approach it from different philosophical and political viewpoints, agreement seems unlikely.
But everyone agrees that something has to change.
Ron Gleim, a Chaplin, Sask., farmer and businessperson who ran federally for the Liberals, said cosmetic changes to federal-provincial programs aren’t enough.
He and another former candidate, Duane Filson, presented a plan to the federal Liberal convention in Vancouver earlier this year. It calls for up front acreage payments each spring.
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During policy discussion at the Farming For Profit conference last week, Gleim said if the Liberals aren’t interested, another party might be.
“There’s going to be another election and if you’re a rural Conservative candidate, you will win whether you have an agriculture policy or not,” he said.
He called for a policy forum, with neutral chairs, to involve producers of all ideologies.
Producers, not bureaucrats, should be making the decisions about their industry, Gleim said.
Jim Mann, president of Farmers of North America, said he first got involved in farm policy 30 years ago when he became a delegate for the former Saskatchewan Wheat Pool.
He wanted to help formulate change but found that difficult.
There are still issues on farmers’ plates from 30 years ago, he told the conference.
“In order to have a future, you have to look into the future,” Mann said. “The problem really is we haven’t sat down and taken a look at what kind of agriculture do we want in Canada and then we can start developing policies.”
National Farmers Union president Stewart Wells said Canada doesn’t have an agriculture policy at all.
“We’ve got a trade policy that sometimes masquerades as ag policy,” he said.
While the federal government focused on aggressive trade targets in the 1990s, exports went through the roof but farm income dropped, Wells said.
Kevin Wipf of the University of Alberta’s political science department, said the fact that agriculture is a shared jurisdiction doesn’t help matters.
Individual provinces don’t agree on policies and they don’t have the same fiscal capacity to deliver programs, he said.
