VANCOUVER — Before the April 15 signing by 125 countries of an international trade agreement, Canadians heard conflicting views on how farmers will be affected.
Television commercials such as the one showing dairy farms being transformed from pastoral to derelict strongly impressed Canadians. When Angus Reid polled 2,000 people across the country in April 1992, 73 percent were aware of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.
Forty-seven percent of those polled said they had heard about marketing boards, compared to nine percent who had heard of lowered tariff barriers, or six percent aware of better export markets for grains. Five percent had heard of improved trading relations.
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Darrell Bricker, of The Angus Reid Group in Ottawa, said it appeared half the people supported GATT. Half didn’t.
“Canadians are highly suspicious of negotiations for trade,” he told the Canada Grains Council annual meeting here.
Survey respondents were also split on whether GATT was good or bad for Canada. But Bricker said the one-quarter of Canadians who were undecided is the more important statistic.
“They don’t think it’s going to create any jobs, and they really don’t think farmers will be better off,” he said.
Farmers will be hurt
However, 67 percent of the population said GATT will affect mainly marketing boards and will hurt farmers: “There is a perceived potential for GATT to hurt farmers,” Bricker said. But 62 percent also believed GATT will help grain farmers because it will open up markets.
Various representatives of the supply-management industries used the grain council’s meeting to try changing attitudes about the effects of GATT, and were critical of past media attention.
Keith McKerracher, of the Canadian Egg Marketing Agency, said media got it wrong when they said supply management was dead. The new GATT agreement replaced import controls with tariffs that the media referred to as “sky-high” or “obscene,” for Canadian products, he said. The media also failed to tell Canadians that every country in the world tried to tear down tariffs of other countries while retaining their own.
Commodities protected
The United States, for example, has high tariffs to protect peanuts, sugar, oranges, lumber and tobacco.
McKerracher said that Canada’s supply-managed industries are not dead, but are in more danger from continual bickering between regions than from external pressure from other countries.
Technical and policy barriers threaten supply management and farmers will need to be fast thinkers to respond to the challenges, he said.
Bob Friesen, Manitoba director for the Canadian Turkey Marketing Agency, also agreed that “examples of death were greatly exaggerated” for supply management.
“We had never received so much attention before … in part we were to blame,” he said. “We could blame the government for not doing enough, but we don’t have enough time, and it would distract from the work that needs to be done.”
Friesen said he believes supply management is not a historical right, but responsible management.
He said while turkey producers were not pleased with the outcome of GATT, they were ready for it when the deal came down.
“We thought there would be two types of industry — quick and dead — so we become architects of viability across the sector.”
