IMAGINE Saskatchewan with 3,000 farms instead of 50,000.
These are not family farms. They are all big corporations. Some have their shares traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Some have their own product brand sold through supermarket chains.
This is not the least bit far-fetched.
The agricultural sector of the Prairies, particularly grain production, is a mess. It has been a mess since at least the early 1980s, when I was reporting on farmgate defences and farm debt review boards.
Tinkering with the system hasn’t worked and won’t work. That includes developing a new Canadian Agricultural Income Stabilization Program (CAIS, properly pronounced chaos.)
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Such programs are simply unable to cope effectively with the structural problems of international agricultural production and trade. Nor can they deal with the patchwork of Canadian laws that affect agriculture but are not agricultural, from banking to transportation. Typically, programs are developed on the basis of inadequate and outmoded thinking.
Moreover, the federal government prefers big (as in global) to small. It prefers “the market,” whatever that is, to farmers working together to solve their problems.
Should a 3,000 farm scenario come to pass, there will be a huge migration of people from the country. Small towns will die right, left and centre. People will move to cities and already more than half the world’s population lives in major cities.
I challenged Lenore Swystun about this. Swystun is running for mayor of Saskatoon, but she grew up on a farm near Redberry Lake, Sask. Her university graduate work focused on rural studies. She has worked in Canada and in developing countries for organizations like the Canadian International Development Agency.
The question: what would happen to Saskatoon if there were sudden and significant migration from rural to urban areas?
Swystun argues that is already happening. She says much of the growth in Saskatchewan cities now comes from farmers moving in. Some are retiring; more simply cannot earn a living on their farms in today’s economic climate.
Swystun sees right through, and beyond, the myth of the rural-urban split. She argues that the vitality of our cities depends on having strong, viable and well-populated rural areas and towns.
“Cities are important markets for locally produced foods,” she noted, and suppliers of resources, processing and innovations for today’s modern mixed farms. So it’s important that rural and urban municipalities work together to develop “balanced and effective” solutions to problems.
We may be able to prevent the 3,000 farm scenario, with its devastating effect on country and city.
But prevention will require people to rethink our values for agriculture – what we want our agricultural sector to be and how we will make that happen.
Rob Brown is a former agricultural writer and broadcaster now doing studies in ethics. He can be reached at cedarrbb@netscape.net.
