Western Producer staff
Quebec farm leader Laurent Pellerin was troubled. After listening to agriculture minister Ralph Goodale defend his government’s program-slashing budget and proclaim an era of market-driven agriculture, Pellerin asked a question that farmers across the country might well contemplate.
Support-slashing can better be accommodated by many farmers now because they are living through a period of relatively buoyant prices and good markets.
But what happens when market conditions change?
How will farmers cope, and what role will the government be prepared to play, when the farm economy hits its next, inevitable downturn? “It may be possible to do it now when markets are good,” Pellerin said. “But what happens when conditions are worse, when price falls? What security do we have?”
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It was a question that cuts to the core of the Liberals’ budget-night message.
At a time when markets are working relatively well, fences are being built around government obligations to farmers.
The real impact will be felt in the future when the market declines but government does not swell to fill the void.
“We have lost our sense of security, of stability,” said Pellerin.
In years to come, that may prove to be as accurate a summation of Liberal farm policy as any.
Last week’s federal budget, exposing as it did the scope of the government’s retreat from farm support programs, was far more than a budget-cutting exercise.
It was an uncommon declaration of Liberal faith in the marketplace.
It was, in effect, a blueprint for redefining the relationship between government and farmer. Programs put in place years ago to smooth out the historic cycles of the farm economy are being diluted or cancelled. The era of special status for farmers is over. Like most other business people, farmers will have to become accustomed to living with the rough justice that the market dishes out.
Deficit-fighting rhetoric aside, the policy is being sold as recognition at long last that economics, not politics, should decide how healthy the farm sector is.
The logic behind the plan goes something like this:
It is government’s job to create trade opportunities and economic conditions (stable interest rates, competitive dollar) that allow business to survive.
It is the obligation of business people like farmers to take advantage of those conditions without expecting government to bail them out if things don’t work out.
“Clearly, the only major obstacle to our continuing growth and security in agriculture are these crippling levels of public debt and deficit,” Goodale told farm leaders last week.
Actually, history would also tell us that cyclical market fluctuations, customer buying power, weather and politics can be counted on to be destabilizing influences from time to time.
Yet the government is on a track of diminishing support, laying the groundwork to end much of its historic role as a counterweight to market instability.
This is the real farm policy revolution that the Liberals have launched.
