WHITEHORSE — The new five-year agricultural policy that agriculture ministers unveiled Sept. 14 represents a seismic shift in government’s view of its obligations to the sector.
For the past half century, since the government of John Diefenbaker introduced the first comprehensive stabilization program for farmers, the core challenge facing successive governments has been how to design programs that would backstop farmers when they faced weather or market upheavals.
The issue was primarily how to design effective income support programs with several underlying questions:
- As a shared constitutional jurisdiction, what should be the spending split between Ottawa and the provinces, between government and farmers?
- Do governments have any obligation to prop up farmers, even if market signals indicate they aren’t viable in the long term for reasons of size, investment or management skills?
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The result, through successive governments, has been enough programs to fill a policy and acronym museum — tripartite, crop insurance, WGSA, GRIP, NISA, CAIS and all the current Agri programs.
When all else failed, governments would often find an ad hoc billion here or there to get farmers through the latest crisis.
The Whitehorse agreement on the Growing Forward 2 five-year policy framework substantially changes the decades-old debate.
It is true, as federal minister Gerry Ritz said, that government programs will continue to provide billions of dollars of farm support over the next five years.
But it also is true that the two key farm income support programs — AgriStability and AgriInvest — are being substantially undermined and governments will spend far less on income support, freeing up hundreds of millions of dollars for other government priorities such as deficit reduction.
Instead, government emphasis switches to programs that support “innovation, competitiveness and market development.”
So that provides Ritz’s answer to the decades-old question about the balance between government and farmer obligations — the emphasis of government support switches from income stabilization to helping equip producers to live or die in the market.
He calls it giving farmers “the tools and the resources they need to stay ahead of the ever changing demands of consumers.”
This is a substantial change of government attitude, and producers should take note. Adapt, and if you don’t (or if you do and it still doesn’t work), don’t expect government to ride to the rescue.
This change of philosophy is a significant triumph for Ritz, and make no mistake, it is largely his vision. The other provincial and territorial ministers signed on, but he drove the process.
Since his days as a Saskatchewan grain farmer, Ritz was convinced that government attempts to support farmers really deterred them from trying to help themselves.
When asked last week about some farm leader arguments that changes to the AgriStability payment trigger formula will so weaken the program’s usefulness that farmers will abandon it, Ritz’s answer was interesting.
“Well, I wouldn’t say I disagree,” he said, before listing other changes that will give farmers the ability to set aside more money to help themselves in bad years.
Behold the future.
