Federal agriculture minister Lyle Vanclief just doesn’t get it. One of Canada’s most important economic sectors, agriculture, is facing disaster. But all he seems to be doing is telling farmers to tighten their belts.
Despite frightening forecasts of sharp drops in farm income, Vanclief said farmers should not expect any emergency federal aid.
In one of the most callous statements ever made by an agriculture minister, he said farmers should just withdraw money from their Net Income
Stabilization Accounts if they need cash.
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Implying that farm finances can’t be as bad as farm leaders say, Vanclief pointedly noted that only 200 farmers out of 143,000 nationwide have made withdrawals from their NISA accounts.
Statements like that will presumably impress urban residents, giving them visions of farmers sitting on fat bank accounts.
What Vanclief wasn’t saying is that, for example,40 percent of Saskatchewan farmers’ NISA accounts have less than $6,000 in them.
That’s a drop in the bucket considering what it takes to operate a farm. Economists estimate the average Canadian farmer has to spend $300,000 to end up with a year’s net income of $30,000. That’s a tight enough margin, but when that modest net income starts dropping by 60 percent a year, it means disaster.
Reform Party leader Preston Manning put it correctly when he said the government would recognize the crisis “if the prices or incomes in any other industrial or commercial sector, such as the auto sector, were to drop by 30 percent or 60 percent.”
Canada’s farmers are a vital part of the national economy. If tens of thousands of them are driven off the land, the effects will be felt everywhere from factories that make pickup trucks to companies that sell satellite dishes.
Because the global market system does not give farmers a fair price for their production, governments everywhere support agriculture, to the benefit of their entire national economies.
Canada’s national government does provide some continuing support, but nowhere near U.S. levels and not nearly enough to allow farmers to cope with extreme price/cost squeezes like the one they currently face.
But instead of taking this view, Vanclief seems to be treating farmers as welfare abusers, telling them to empty every last dime from their pockets and sell luxuries like television sets before asking for more support.
Even U.S. president Bill Clinton, who just pushed Congress into approving a $7 billion for U.S. farmers, has more class than that.
