IMAGINE three greenhouse operations sitting side by side growing tree seedlings: one of them for the Christmas tree market; one for orchards; and one supplying seedlings to government or corporate reforestation efforts.
All three are considered farm operations for tax and program purposes.
But one of the three, the one with reforestation customers, is denied access to a national farm support program that in some years sends hundreds of thousands of dollars to its neighbouring farms.
The Canadian Agricultural Income Stabilization program says forestry companies or government agencies funding reforestation programs are not appropriate customers.
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“For the purposes of the CAIS program, tree seedlings used for reforestation is not an eligible commodity regardless of their classification by the province or (the tax department),” British Columbia agriculture minister Pat Bell wrote to a B.C. seedling grower last year. “Tree seedlings have always been considered non-allowable based on their end use in forestry.”
This position by agriculture ministers is inconsistent and absurd, the kind of thing that gives regulation a bad name. It also could be seen as an uncomfortable precedent as Canada’s farmers increasingly grow crops for non-food corporate uses.
It is inconsistent because it presumably is based on the judgment that providing product to forestry companies is outside the parameters of agriculture.
But growing trees used to decorate the Christmas season has nothing to do with food and Christmas tree growers often sell to hardware and grocery corporate giants.
Producing crops to sell to ethanol and biodiesel manufacturers, many of them large multinationals, is deemed agricultural enough to qualify for CAIS money but not farms that have corporate forestry customers. It makes no sense.
It is absurd because it clearly violates the agreed-upon principles for the implementation of business risk management programs.
The principles endorsed by ministers in 2002-03 include that “programs should minimize moral hazard and not influence farmers’ production and marketing decisions” and farmers “in similar circumstances” should receive “the same level of protection.”
Those three greenhouses certainly seem to be “in similar circumstances” except that they have a different customer base. Ruling one type of customer inappropriate certainly influences marketing decisions.
The problem has dawned on at least a few ministers as they debate the design of the new farm policy framework but the unanimous agreement needed to change program eligibility policy is hard to find.
Eastern ministers are nervous that a corporate behemoth like New Brunswick’s Irving group of companies, with Cavendish Farms as part of the stable, could set up a taxpayer-supported seedling company to supply the J.D. Irving forestry company that controls millions of acres of wood land.
Robin Dawes of K & C Silviculture in Oliver, B.C., one of the seedling farms denied CAIS help, says she has some sympathy for the politicians.
“I think they really are in a bit of a pickle,” she says. “I understand the position of not wanting to use farm programs to subsidize big corporations but as I see it, they are acting contrary to their own legislation. They can’t escape that fact.”
Those are reasonable words.
