Statistics are greasy little pigs that we journalists have to often wrestle with, and many times the pigs win and get away from us.
But sometimes we can wrestle them down and make them squeal for the reader. This is good.
But sometimes, if they’re tackled too hard, they’ll scream and writhe and get mutilated. That’s what we don’t want.
But before I blather on vaguely about that topic any longer, allow me to step aside for a moment and offer great praise – on behalf of farmers – to The Globe and Mail newspaper for making agriculture and food exports the BIG news story of today. “A warning to Canada: Start Growing” is a story on top of its front page today that will no doubt draw much attention to Canada’s declining world ranking in terms of world agriculture and food exports. And it pointedly notes that “Agriculture and the agri-food system represent a core sector of the economy, generating two million jobs and $154 billion in food and beverage consumer sales and accounting for 8.2 percent of GDP.”
Read Also
Canola or cars? Canada can’t save both
Canola is a winning industry. It feeds the economy, supports thousands of families and helps keep our rural communities alive.
Here’s the lede (first sentence) of the story: “Canada has lost its status as a food-producing superpower and needs a drastic overhaul of its agricultural policy if it hopes to compete in world markets and feed more of its own people.”
Wowzers, that’ll get people talking about this issue.
I’m not kidding. Most of the national media meekly follow the news agenda laid out on the front page of the Globe and Mail every day, so when the G & M puts something on the top of the front page and plays it big and dramatic, other media will almost certainly do likewise.
So farmers should be happy that Canada’s most important mainstream media voice and dominant opinion-setter is making clued-out Canadians realize that farming is a vitally important industry and a national champion, upon which millions of jobs rely. Most urbanites don’t realize that.
I just hope, for the sake of farmers, readers don’t dig too deeply into the numbers, but simply accept the Globe’s angle on the story. Because the statistics used in this story, and the report it’s based on, only look bad if you line them up a certain way. (Like that Wizard of Id strip in which the King was asked if his 99 concubines were really each more beautiful than the one before. “Only if you line them up that way,” the king noted, if I remember right.)
Here’s the good angle for urbanites to swallow, if farmers want them to fund more ag research and trade expansion: “The Problem: A decade ago, Canada was the third-largest exporter of food – it’s now ranked 7th. In 2009, exports fell nine percent from the year before to $38.8 billion. Imports rose two percent in 2009.”
That was on the front page, describing Canada’s disastrous fall as a food exporter.
Here’s a chart from the story on page four:
I took that fancy pic with my Blackberry camera. Isn’t modern technology amazing! Anyhow, what’s a little discombobulating about that graphic used in support of this story is that it shows Canada’s ag and food exports increasing by about 25 percent between 2001 and 2008. Sure, they didn’t increase by as much as Brazil’s, but who would expect them to. Brazil, where I was sent in 2003 to see that country’s amazing agricultural expansion, has been able to put tens of millions of acres of new land into production, a luxury we don’t have. Argentina? Weren’t their exports screwed-up by that nation’s bankruptcy and huge export taxes on crops in the early 2000s? China? Isn’t China expanding superfast in a historical revolution?
In that light, simply keeping Canada’s share of world ag and food exports doesn’t seem so bad. I would have expected it to have dropped. But to have increased Canada’s world ag and food export share is pretty impressive.
What’s happened to U.S. ag and food exports? Europe’s? Not in there. Hmmmmmmm.
So with journalism, stats are greasy pigs that squeal unpredictably when you grab them. These stats, the way they’re used here, will likely make people spit out their morning coffee and say “By jeekers, we need to pour more money into agricultural research or we’ll be WIPED FROM THE AG EXPORT LISTINGS ALTOGETHER.”
For farmers, that would be a good reaction. So we won’t care. But some time the stat will be on the other foot, and it won’t feel too good when it’s booted into farmers.
On a totally unrelated matter, I note that the Canadian Wheat Board today announced it would soon launch the first two ships in a new grain hauling fleet on the Great Lakes. I don’t know if they have named these ships yet, but if not, here are my suggestions:
HMCWBS Dreadnought – after the great ship of 1906 that began the Dreadnought race and continued British battleship supremacy.
HMCWBS Rodney – after the Second World War British Battleship that has a funny name and looks funny because a arms limitation treaty signed after its construction began forced the designers to scrap the back end of the ship. My father saw this mighty vessel as he sat, as a schoolboy during the war, atop the hills over Milford Haven harbour, and the HMS Rodney always occupies a special place in my heart, so I’d like to see its namesake hauling Canadian Wheat.
