I'll be brief.
The central question you ask is about what kinds of farmers we want, how do we want our food produced. That's why the APF II process has been so disappointing. They talk about the vision as though it were some hyped-up, new, exciting policy direction, when in reality it's just a continuation of about 40 years of policy direction that is clearly not working. No matter how you look at it, how you divide it up, how you study it, it's clear that the income at the farm gate is on a rapid decline. Programs like CAIS, which is margin-based, mean that every year in declining markets you're ratcheting down the available pot of money to any particular farm operation, and every year it's a little bit less. There's no talk about changing that.
The APF II process has to be turned around and changed. We have to decide who is going to produce our food, but we also have to be using some of the tools we currently have. We have a Competition Act. We've never used it. We've never enforced it.
As agribusiness gets more and more consolidated, there is more pressure. They become both the buyer of product and the seller of product to farmers, and that's a pretty no-win situation for any family farm. We have sanitary and phytosanitary rules that we can enforce for food coming into this country, but we allow black water, which is sewage sludge, to be sprayed on strawberries in Mexico, and then they're shipped into Canada at the height of the strawberry season to compete on the grocery store shelf with our strawberries grown to our standards.
We need to decide whether we have some backbone in this country and we're actually going to stand up for our farmers, our primary producers, our communities, our consumers, or are we just going to continue down this road that tries to pretend that the U.S. Farm Bill doesn't exist, that it's not there, that we're not competing against these things? The APF II process is a complete disappointment.