It’s scary when the National Farmers Union purports to speak on behalf of farmers and mainstream media outlets lap it up like gospel.
A CBC news story run locally on Nov. 26 and then aired on the CBC National News on Nov. 27 promoted the long-held NFU viewpoint that big farmers and any non-farmer ownership of farmland is bad. Big farms are going to decimate small communities as the population drops and schools and hospitals close.
There’s some truth to this and some sympathy for the viewpoint beyond the core NFU membership, but their solution is to limit farm size.
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On that, most of the farm community disagrees. To the credit of the reporter, Saskatchewan Agriculture Minister David Marit was included in the story saying that limiting farm size was not something governments should do. The story also included a clip from Robert Andjelic, one of the largest farmland owners in the province, who leases land to producers.
Much less balanced was a Nov. 27 story in the Toronto Star written by Marie-Claude Lortie, a former columnist at La Presse and now editor-in-chief at Le Droit. The title of the story: “How Stephen Harper and an Italian love of terroir drove Alberta farmers into a trade war.”
The story is all about the use of pre-harvest glyphosate and how the concern over glyphosate residue dramatically reduced Italian imports of Canadian durum for a year or two. The story is rife with misinformation. First of all, although you wouldn’t know it from the headline, Saskatchewan is the biggest durum producing province, not Alberta.
The author travelled to Gragnano, Italy, which considers itself the city of pasta and has a protected geographic indication (terroir) for pasta. It’s fine if some Italian pasta makers think their durum has superior flavour. It’s also fine to chronicle ongoing concerns that durum and therefore pasta shouldn’t have glyphosate residue.
But of all the farm organizations the writer could have quoted, she chose the National Farmers Union and spoke with NFU policy and research director Cathy Holtslander. Holtslander claimed a link between former prime minister Stephen Harper’s elimination of the Canadian Wheat Board 10 years ago and the use of glyphosate before harvest.
Holtslander is quoted in the story as saying the wheat board brought price stability, and since farmers couldn’t count on that anymore, they cut corners to preserve their livelihood. She is also quoted as saying the new resellers that have replaced the wheat board have started to compete with Italian growers in their own market, “something the old Canadian government organization never did.”
Most farmers in Western Canada reading the story would just shake their heads at the extreme left-wing bias and naivety. If anything, times have been more profitable in the years since the CWB monopoly ended. There’s no evidence to suggest any link to the use of pre-harvest glyphosate.
However, the Toronto Star’s core readership of urban people won’t have the background to dispute this nonsense.
It’s amazing how often the National Farmers Union gets mainstream media attention relative to the size of its membership and its lack of engagement on issues. Unfortunately, a lot of mainstream media is agriculture ignorant and also very left-wing, so they like what the NFU has to say.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and from time to time the NFU does some good research and raises valid issues. But you hear the NFU quoted much less in agricultural media, and that’s directly related to credibility.
Kevin Hursh is an agricultural journalist, consultant and farmer. He can be reached by e-mail at kevin@hursh.ca.
