QUOTA TROUBLE
Regarding the letter to the Editor “Proudly Canadian” by Randall Affleck of the National Farmers’ Union (WP July 26): I do not have a problem with dairy farmers making a decent return for their efforts and investment.
I do have a problem with consumers having to pay for a quota over and over and over.
The quotas were originally assigned to producers at no cost.
Producer A received a quota free of charge.
Producer A retires.
Producer B would like to get into the dairy business but cannot get a quota.
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Producer A offers to sell his free quota to Producer B for $250,000. Eventually Producer B retires and sells his originally free quota to Producer C for $500,000.
Producer C now puts a value of $1 milion on the quota. The average quota in Canada is valued at over $1.1 million or $22,000 plus per milking cow.
In fact, the cost of a quota almost equals the investment to set up a dairy farm. Consumers pay for the cost of a quota every time it changes hands.
The quota system doubles the investment required to produce milk and adds absolutely nothing to production.
The system also allows for a disproportionate share of production to be allocated to certain sections of the country.
Grocery outlets in the U.S.A. sell milk for 60 to 70 cents per litre. Our cost in Canada is $1.30 to $1.60 or more per litre.
A good portion of that difference goes to pay for the quota.
Roger Brandl,
Fort St. John, B.C.
FREEDOM AT LAST?
Prime minister (Stephen) Harper came to a farm near Kindersley, Sask., to inform a group of producers assembled there that finally they would no longer be controlled by the Canadian Wheat Board.
He did not tell them that they no longer have the right to democratically elect producers to an organization to sell their own grain.
Global grain interests, who planned the demise of the CWB, glibly suggested that the CWB was an era of past times. They are wrong.
The loss of the CWB has regressed the rights of producers to an era that existed in the 1920s and the 1930s, a time when our pioneer farm families were at the non-existent mercies of the autocrats of the Winnipeg Grain Exchange.
The problem that will now prevail is that producers will be at the mercies of a few giant global corporations. Seventy to 90 percent of the world’s grain trade is controlled by the ABCD group. They are — Archer Daniel Midland, Bunge, Cargill and (Louis) Dreyfus.
Canadians will witness the rapid expansion and control of agriculture by corporations.
The CWB consisted of 15 directors. Ten of those directors were democratically elected, bona fide prairie farmers.
Over the many years of CWB tenure, a high percentage of those elected were solid supporters of the single desk selling monopoly of the CWB.
In fact, a recent poll of producers held in the CWB region revealed that 61.77 percent of producers favored the single desk monopoly of the CWB, while 38.22 opposed the single desk.
Harper and (agriculture minister Gerry) Ritz used questionable tactics to eliminate the CWB. They have done so with impunity. This is a government that regularly reminds Canada’s parliamentarians that they have “a solid majority” in the House of Commons.
That so-called majority represents fewer than 40 percent of Canadians that voted for Conservatives candidates in the last election — over 60 percent did not vote for Conservatives.
Your readers will recognize that there is a political label for a government that does comply with the bidding of the corporate sector, rather than comply with the wishes of the majority of Canadian voters.
Leo Kurtenbach,
Saskatoon, Sask.
