Easter stretches for silver lining in income numbers - Opinion

PASS THE painkillers please. Prince Edward Island Liberal MP Wayne Easter never doubted the challenge he faced when agriculture minister Andy Mitchell picked him last year to try to find ways to address the awful reality of declining farm incomes and how to turn it around.

Last week provided a stark reminder of the size of the problem.

Agriculture Canada predicted that despite billions of dollars in projected government program payments, farmers in four key agricultural provinces Ñ Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and Prince Edward Island Ñ will work this year for nothing, will pay their bills by eating equity.

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Incredibly, Saskatchewan’s farm sector will face its third consecutive year of heavy losses, bringing the three-year cumulative total loss after depreciation to $900 million.

Meanwhile, the raw commodities produced by the province’s farmers will be converted into products that cost consumers billions of dollars to buy and have given the processors and middlemen hundreds of millions of dollars in profit.

Companies that supplied farmers the equipment they need to plant and harvest their crop and the chemicals they buy to try to secure a healthy crop (frost notwithstanding) also made hundreds of millions of dollars in profits from those sales.

In this equation, farmers are the meat in the economic sandwich.

Welcome to Wayne’s world, a place where expectations for solutions are high and answers are few and often incremental.

Sitting in his office on a Monday evening, Easter tries to sound upbeat.

“These numbers show the reality of what we are dealing with and I guess the one silver lining I can take out of this is that in the last six months, neither the minister nor I have been trying to spin this as anything other than disaster,” he said Feb. 21. “We are not spinning a silver lining here and that’s a bit of a silver lining.”

In a separate interview, agriculture minister Andy Mitchell did concede the point of brutal numbers while noting that compared to the guaranteed farm safety net of $600 million in the late 1990s, the guarantee is now $1.1 billion and spending is actually at record levels nearing $5 billion.

Yet farm income is lower now than in the days when Ottawa budgeted “just” $600 million in aid. Those extra government dollars simply backfill farmer losses and industry profits.

The farm economy has tanked.

The powerful corporate players take what they can extract, knowing that governments will intervene to the extent necessary to keep the farm economy alive so that rural Canada limps along, some small communities survive and the food processing and industrial sector continues to receive the cheap raw commodity it needs to create its multibillion pyramid.

Easter says the government recognizes the need and is there to help farmers. He worries about provincial support. Of course, the provinces accuse Ottawa of starving their budgets.

Farmers, the base of multi-billion dollar input, output, marketing and financing sector profits, are reduced to being sad-sack welfare recipients.

As he contemplates problems and solutions, pass Easter the painkillers.

Better yet, ship him some LSD so he can hallucinate about a more logical economic system. That was his generation, after all.