special reports editor
NO DOUBT, the “information officer” employed by multinational agribusiness and pharmaceutical company Novartis saw the question coming.
It had just become known last week that the food-producing arm of Novartis has decided not to use genetically modified material in its foods, even though the seed-producing arm of the company continues to aggressively promote and market GM varieties.
The company official had been explaining why Novartis, the food product maker, decided to bow to obvious consumer unease about GM food.
A Reuters News Agency reporter asked the obvious question: Isn’t there a conflict between the anti-GMO attitude of one company division and the pro-GMO attitude of the other?
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“That’s a totally different question,” said the company man.
Pardon? That is a totally irrelevant answer, the reporter must have thought.
But it did the trick. It diverted attention from a sticky issue. One familiar tool of information management is to answer the question you wish had been asked, not the question actually asked.
The obvious answer to the Novartis question would have been: “Of course, we have an internal corporate inconsistency as big as Nunavut. That’s obvious.”
Instead, the answer raised doubts about the validity of the question.
That brings us to the curious decision by Agriculture Canada to continue to compile and publish farm income forecasts.
What question are they trying to answer?
At the end of July, the department issued its latest predictions to 2004.
It predicted above-average incomes this year, decline for the next two and then a rise in 2003 above the five-year average.
Farmers wondering how they would pay this year’s bills snorted in disbelief at the message being packaged for urban audiences that happy days are here again on the farm.
It is true, of course, that government dollars have turned a sure-loss into break-even or small profit for some, but the prospect of this being seen as life saving government largesse months before an election was too much.
So here is the question: what is the purpose of these income forecasts?
From a farmer point of view, they either project falling incomes, which leads to depression, or soaring incomes, which lead to disbelief and accusations of government political manipulation.
From an economist point of view, they are all but irrelevant. Predicting market prices, market demand, dollar values and farm costs six months down the road, never mind four years, is impossible.
From a bureaucratic perspective, the argument is that these numbers show trends, which help in policy planning.
But from a political vantage point, policy pressures come from real conditions, not presumptions and predictions. And predictions that do not equate with the way farmers are experiencing the world simply aggravate.
Why do it? Will this give farmers or lenders,or policy makers accurate information about how individual farmers will do this year, or in 2004?
“That’s a totally different question,” a government defender might explain.
And that’s the rub.
