Out among the dust-dry potato, grain and vegetable fields and pastures of Prince Edward Island lie answers to some of the questions agriculture minister Lyle Vanclief keeps asking.
Why don’t more farmers buy crop insurance?
Why do Net Income Stabilization Accounts remain unused if farmers are pleading poverty?
Why don’t farmers concede that Canada’s bundle of safety net programs and this year’s $3 billion plus in spending is a generous response to farm income woes?
Vanclief has other questions but these are the core of his efforts to suggest to voters that there is help available, if only farmers made use of it.
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P.E.I. is a good place to look for answers, although equally good answers exist among farmers in all parts of the country.
Still, the “garden province” is the kind of place where the safety nets should be proving their worth these days. Without bad luck, P.E.I. would have no luck at all.
Last year, after a bumper potato crop, a political disaster struck.
The Americans closed the border and potato industry revenues plummeted.
This year, like much of the rest of Canada, the climate is the enemy. Production in all crops will be down. The air is filled with complaints about the inadequacy of the available programs.
So why don’t more farmers buy crop insurance?
The simple P.E.I. answer is that many do, but it is not well suited to the potato industry.
Insurance doesn’t cover deterioration in crops stored after Dec. 22, “so we don’t have as much of an uptake in that program as many other provinces do,” says provincial agriculture minister Mitch Murphy.
Even among those who regularly buy crop insurance, the payback of 50 percent or so usually doesn’t cover input costs, never mind replace lost income.
“City people might respond to Vanclief because they think crop insurance is like fire insurance, 100 percent coverage,” says a farmer with insurance. “It is far from it.”
Well then, what about NISA?
Don’t even ask the farmer who had to drain his NISA last year to cover losses from the potato wars and then was forced out of the program for two years because he withdrew more than he was eligible to take.
Overall, NISA accounts were more than half emptied last year and many of those still flush are owned by the minority of farmers in a position not to have to struggle to pay the bills.
To them that have (or make), more is given.
And as farmers increasingly wonder if their farm really is the pension asset it once was considered, they see few other retirement funds than their NISA.
Contributing to both NISA and a separate retirement fund is out of the question for most people, even when they are making money.
But surely $3 billion in farm support payments is a generous response by a grateful government, isn’t it?
A potato farmer who was denied a Canadian Farm Income Program payment last year, despite a loss, snorts at the question.
“It sounds like a lot to city people but I don’t know anyone around here that’s received enough to make a dent in their problems.”
Next question?
