IT TOOK the combined effort of a former east coast farm radical and a left wing Saskatchewan poet-politician to challenge assumptions long held by conservative economists, government planners and some farm leaders about the causes of farm income declines and the solutions.
Wayne Easter, Liberal MP, parliamentary secretary to agriculture minister Andy Mitchell and former National Farmers Union president, put the proverbial cat among the pigeons in early July when he presented a report to federal and provincial ministers that challenged two cherished farm policy beliefs.
The report was written, sometimes eloquently, by former Saskatchewan New Democrat MP, journalist, published poet and biographer Dennis Gruending, who used his wordsmith skills to make Easter’s arguments.
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At the very least, their report should inspire a debate about the real cause of the farm income crisis and how it might be tackled, beyond costly government subsidies to fill the income hole that market returns leave.
In his report, Easter argued:
- Farmer efficiency and farm size are not core reasons for chronically low farm incomes.
A marketplace where farmers are weak and their corporate suppliers and buyers are strong is the core reason.
- Free trade agreements are not a core solution, since increased trade merely creates more profits for powerful input suppliers, output buyers and traders while leaving farmers selling low-price commodities.
His analysis angered the “trade-is-the-answer” lobbyists who insist that if only governments quit subsidizing and protecting farmers, prices would rise, trade would increase and farmers would be better off.
Easter would argue that is na•ve at best, assuming that powerful market players will make sure farmers receive a fair return if prices rise.
His analysis has ruffled the feathers of agri-business because it argues that they use their market power to their own advantage at the expense of farmers.
Easter would respond that they need only look at the record of the past 30 years to see commodity price increases were followed by increases to input and output supplier prices that captured most of the benefit.
And Easter does not simply slag market forces and corporate players.
He accuses Agriculture Canada, for whom he speaks in Parliament when Mitchell is not present, of basing much of its farm policy for the past 40 years on the “efficiency myth.”
If only farmers were bigger, more efficient, better managers, they could manage the market and extract their fair share from a prosperous food industry.
Easter is dismissive.
The “cruel process” of increasing farm efficiency sent two-thirds of them out of the industry in the past 50 years.
“Farmers do not have a problem with efficiency,” he said. “They have a problem with prices and costs because too often they can control neither.”
As a rookie MP after 1993, Easter once confronted a senior Agriculture Canada official with the accusation that the department seems to think there are too many farmers to be efficient.
“Are there few enough of us?” he asked.
He was barely out of the NFU trenches at that point so the question was not surprising.
Since then, he has spent years defending Liberal government assumptions he denounced as a farm leader.
With the July report, Easter returned to his roots.
