FOR FARMERS who imagine a deep well of public sympathy for their position, last week produced discouraging news.
Public opinion surveys conducted for Agriculture Canada last winter suggest that consumer support is a mile wide and an inch deep.
Consumers and taxpayers have become “inured to cries of crisis on the farms,” Ekos Research president Frank Graves said last week. “Urban Canadians don’t know a great deal about how farms work. Food is something that magically appears, shrink wrapped, in the supermarket.”
Asked about it or confronted by protesting farmers, Canadian consumers make sympathetic noises. “Farmers are important. We need our farmers.”
Read Also
Topsy-turvy precipitation this year challenges crop predictions
Rainfall can vary dramatically over a short distance. Precipitation maps can’t catch all the deviations, but they do provide a broad perspective.
It means nothing.
A few years ago, a national business reporter based in Ottawa told a Canadian Federation of Agriculture meeting that consumers may sympathize when they read stories about poor farmers but ultimately, they go to the supermarket and find a vast variety of affordable food.
“There is no food shortage at my Loblaws,” he said. “Where is the crisis?”
Precisely. Farmers with protest signs equating eating and farming, or farmer tractor parades decrying low incomes, draw the usual honks from passing motorists and the usual supportive callers to radio phone-in shows.
Many farmers and their leaders take that as a measure of public support. They cite polls that show majority sympathy for farm families.
Forget it. Consumers are notorious for telling pollsters what they think is the right thing to say and then acting differently.
Polls say consumers support local and organic production but when confronted with higher prices or less-than-perfect fruits and vegetables, store owners find consumers buying cheaper products.
Polls say taxpayers support more aid for farmers but every proposal for a tax increase draws protest.
Consumers speak with generosity when asked about help for farmers and the need to preserve family farms but act cost-consciously and selfishly when spending their own money.
It is human nature.
It also is not surprising that non-farm taxpayers tire of the seemingly constant demand for more farm aid.
Prices are low, help us. Weather is bad, help us. The Americans get more than we do, help us. Half a billion dollars? Get real, help us.
A taxpayer lament might be: what do farmers want? Aren’t we spending billions of dollars on this problem?
All of this plays into the federal government’s hand. It wants to move “beyond crisis management.” It wants to support farmers who produce commodities or services that pay their own way, that do not require subsidies.
It wants to de-emphasize government support as the basis of agriculture policy.
And in support of that goal, Ottawa can point farmers to lack of public support for unending subsidies.
Ekos did its research for the federal government and agriculture minister Lyle Vanclief decried the lack of public understanding of agriculture’s contribution.
But it is difficult not to suspect that the news of public indifference to farmer complaints was music to the ears of government planners.
