Grain prices are like the weather. Everybody talks about them but nobody does anything about them.
Wheat is now at its lowest level since the Depression days of 1933. Farmers are demonstrating.
Federal politicians are saying there is help in place. Wait. Flawed though it may be, give it a chance.
Saskatchewan’s provincial politicians, notably premier Roy Romanow and agriculture minister Eric Upshall, are saying “it’s not our fault” while pointing fingers at the feds.
Subsidies by the United States and the European Union are keeping world prices down. Canada isn’t paying its farmers nearly the subsidies these other two countries are paying.
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Canadian politicians love to point to upcoming World Trade Organization meetings as the forum where they will come down hard on international subsidies.
Hopefully they will, but if Canadian Wheat Board CEO Greg Arason is to be believed, there will be no change for at least four years.
In a session with journalists last week, Arason said that from past experience, reducing subsidies is a two to three-year negotiation process followed by an implementation process which could take a year or more.
Subsidy reduction “is not a short-term solution,” he said.
Nor was there any joy for farmers in his answer to a Winnipeg Free Press reporter who asked about the future of grain farming.
Farmers, particularly in southeastern Saskatchewan and southwestern Manitoba, are facing a “desperate situation,” he said.
Subsidies aside, farmers “won’t see answers in the short term, it’s an evolutionary process.”
It has been pointed out that farming has always been a risky occupation with no guarantees; no one disputes that. All farmers are asking for is a level playing field, something not allowed them by their own governments.
It is going to be interesting to see how this plays out in Saskatchewan this fall. The expected October election is now, given the probable late harvest, expected in mid-September.
Many farmers are less than enamored with the provincial government’s explanation that the feds are totally to blame.
It won’t be an easy ride for Romanow.
He can be forgiven for wishing that he’d gone to the people last spring as originally expected.
Then, he only had angry nurses to face. Now he has angry farmers too and three expensive byelections to justify.
