Thank you.
I could give you a report on every square inch of the London airport too, if you want it. I've spent a great deal of time there today.
I'm from the National Farmers Union, and we really welcome this opportunity to bring the views of our family farm members to the House of Commons standing committee.
We're a direct membership organization, we're nationwide, and we're made up exclusively of farm families and those who believe in a sustainable food system. The NFU was founded in 1969, and our predecessor organizations and the NFU have always worked to implement policies that help to ensure that agriculture is socially, environmentally, and economically sustainable.
Those of us in the NFU produce a wide number of commodities, but we believe that working together is more important than sitting in our own little silos. That's the way we get the best results: by working together and making sure that we have results that work for everybody. Self-interest is the road to self-destruction, in the NFU's view.
We also believe that food production should lead to enriched soils and a more beautiful countryside, jobs for non-farmers, thriving rural communities, and healthy, natural ecosystems. We've seen a decimation of rural communities, growing environmental problems, plummeting farm numbers, and the present farming crisis. They raise serious questions among our membership about current national agricultural and trade policies.
When you come to the current agricultural policy framework, or APF, this represents a major concern for our membership. During the last five years, since the APF was implemented, there has been a dramatic decline in the viability of family farm operations across the country. Not only have farm gate prices declined for most major commodities, but input prices for machinery, seed, fertilizer, and credit have increased, while infrastructure and regulatory costs keep getting shoved down to the farm gate level.
Our organization has been very involved with the APF process, both rounds one and two. We've been encouraging our members to go out and participate, because we believe we're in a serious situation. Using their own out-of-pocket expenses, a lot of our members have gone out to participate, to make sure the views of farmers are laid at the forefront. They've done this sometimes in very poor weather and by travelling long distances, because they know that the heart of what's going on right now is the question of realized net farm income.
It's a cliché, but it's the truth that farmers are the foundation of the food system in Canada. But we seem to forget that. We seem to think grocery stores are the foundation of the food system in Canada.
Farmers are producers of wealth in this nation, and it's a simple fact that farmers need to earn a fair return on our labour and investment. Any agricultural policy that downplays or ignores the legitimate requirements of family farmers in order to boost the profitability of processors, exporters, and other components of the food system is inherently inequitable and unsustainable.
We've had APF for five years, but APF is really just the continuation of a policy that was started in 1969 by the Federal Task Force on Agriculture. That policy basically said there were too many farmers in Canada and that the way to move agriculture into the future was to push about a third of farmers out of the system, make more direct links between them, and integrate them more with agribusiness through production contracts and debt financing. It sounds pretty familiar when compared to the situation we're in right now.
When we look at what's happening, their prophecies have become fulfilled. If the goal of our current food system is to make sure everybody else but farmers makes money, it has been a resounding success. If the goal is to actually make sure we have food security and food sovereignty in this country, it has been a resounding failure.
You'll be able to read the brief, so I want to tell you a couple of stories when I have the opportunity. I go out and I spend a lot of time talking to farmers at their kitchen table. There are a couple in this room who have probably at least done the same, where they've been at a kitchen table with an old couple who, with tears in their eyes, are saying, “I want my children to do anything else but farm”. They know that if they take up the occupation, the calling of farming, they're resigning themselves to never-ending financial problems, and they're going to be working off the farm constantly and full-time on the farm.
There's no such thing as a part-time farmer. That's a phrase that drives me around the bend. Everyone is farming full-time. They work off the farm full-time as well. So while other people who work in a factory, or whatever, are settling down to watch whatever the latest, most popular television show is, they're heading out to the barn to do chores. And they'll wrap up at about 10 or 11 o'clock at night.
When parents see their lives like this, they don't want that for their children. That's a failure of policy in this country. There's no other way to look at that. It is an absolute, blunt failure. We've failed the next generation of farmers. And the APF, too--I'm here to tell you--is not going to make it better. It's going to make it worse.
We've been very much involved in that process. I've been in round one, and I've been to a round two.... They're very tightly controlled and scripted, and there's really not much ability for farmers to talk about their stories, to talk about what it's like to be a farmer in 2007 in Canada.
The other thing that doesn't happen is this. Nobody has actually stopped and said, “The policies we have now, are they working? Are they working for anybody?”
So back in 2003 the NFU did a groundbreaking document. It's called The Farm Crisis, Bigger Farms, and the Myths of Competition and Efficiency. What it found was that while farmers were seeing record low net realized income--the lowest ever in Canadian history--41 of Canada's largest agribusiness companies were making record profits. So current agricultural policy is working really well for somebody.
My grandmother, who passed away in the eighties, used to have a saying that I remember: “There's a lot of money to be made in agriculture; the problem is that none of it's in farming.” That's as true today as it ever was. It's quite a trick to turn the record kinds of profits that are happening in the agricultural sector into a negative $10,000 income per farm, on average. That's quite a magic trick. And that's a policy failure.
It's not farmers. People like to blame farmers. If you look at the data, efficiency has gone through the roof in the farm sector. We're one of the most efficient industries in Canada. Profits are in the basement; gross profit is in the basement. Exports are through the roof; profit, income, is in the basement. There's a real disconnect.
I've been involved at the grassroots level with public policy in a variety of different areas for close to 20 years. One of the things I learned when I was at one of the APF.... I have to say that this was one of the strangest things I ever heard, and I think it's at the root of what's happening. A senior bureaucrat from Ontario, who was at the front of the room giving presentations, said to us, “We're here today to talk about the agricultural industry. We can't talk about rural communities, because they're two separate things. Sure, they may have some connections, but they're two separate things.”
Well, the fact of the matter is you can't separate them. They're one and the same; they go together. And if you cannot deal with the one, you cannot deal with the other. If you want bums in the pews in local churches and kids in the local schools, you have to have a sustainable and viable farming community.
I'm here to make a pretty blunt assessment. The current policy direction is at the root of the farm income crisis. The farm income crisis is real, it is hard, and it is devastating for a lot of families. The only way to solve the farm income crisis is to stop, look at where we are, and turn around to look at how we can actually bring young people into farming. This is the only way.
When you look at the numbers, about 90% of family income, for those making less than $100,000 in gross revenues from their farms, comes from off-farm sources--90%. As for those in our medium- and larger-sized operations, they make between $100,000 and $499,000 gross. More than half of their income is coming from off-farm sources--half of their income, when they're grossing that kind of money--just so they can be able to have a good, decent quality of life in Canada. As for our largest farmers, who make more than half a million dollars a year, their income still includes a component of about 25% to a third of off-farm income.
So on the bottom line, it's policy, it's the farm economy, it's a direction that we are going in that is not working. When you see the things coming out of the agricultural policy framework, as leaders of this country, be skeptical. I went to one when I wrote a letter after the summation saying they got it completely wrong. The meeting they described is completely different from the meeting I attended. I'm not the only one. People have been to other meetings. I've yet to get a response. Then when I went to the second round of consultations, there was exactly the same document as the one I had objected to.
I was able to object because I made records. I come from that long line of people who think you'd better make sure you know what you're doing and make sure you have a record, so I had my record. By coincidence, most of the comments in that document for the science and technology one happened to be comments that were centred around things I'd been saying, and seven weeks later, no response.
When you're setting policy, when we move to the future, remember those families with tears in their eyes who don't want their children to farm, to produce your food--your food. They don't want their children to do that because they're condemning them to a difficult life. Then when you get the stuff from this process, be skeptical, ask questions; ask basic questions. Ask who this is going to work for and how you can fix it for those families. I tell you, if you go out and spend five minutes with one of those families and you see people who are proud, who are hard-working, and who are reduced to tears in that situation, often with a stranger in front of them, those are very deep, deep emotions, and they're real. There's nothing wrong in acknowledging that.