Thank you Mr. Chair. Thank you for inviting us to appear before Canada's Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food. I will presenting along with my colleague, Mario, who will use his time to talk to you about a business called momagri.
I would like to state from the outset, Mr. Chair, that we do not claim to have one comprehensive solution to such a complex issue. We do hope, however, that in the short time that has been given to us, we will be able to shed an interesting and useful light on this issue and give you some food for thought about some aspects of this matter.
First, allow me to briefly describe the Coopérative fédérée de Québec. We are a federation of 105 Canadian agricultural and agrifood cooperatives representing approximately 85,000 members. The Coopérative fédérée de Québec and its affiliated cooperatives represent $6 billion in sales and approximately 16,000 Canadian jobs in four Canadian provinces. Our member cooperatives are mainly located in Quebec, New Brunswick and Ontario. We are also active in Alberta through our Olymel affiliate and we have sales offices in various countries, for example, Japan and Australia.
The Coopérative fédérée de Québec and its affiliated cooperatives are primarily involved in the supply of farm inputs and in the distribution of hardware and petroleum products. The Coopérative fédérée de Québec and some of its member cooperatives are also involved in the food processing sector. Furthermore, several of our member cooperatives are involved in food distribution. The Coopérative fédérée de Québec is therefore at the very heart of an organizational structure that includes agricultural producers, consumers, food distributors and processors. I believe that gives us a unique perspective on our agriculture and agri-food sectors.
The question certainly deserves to be asked. The marked decrease in agricultural producers' net incomes and the increase in their level of debt begs certain questions. These deteriorating circumstances have been accompanied by a marked increase in governments' financial commitments over the same period of time. This situation can partly be explained by a series of epizootic diseases, for example the beef and pork crises, an increase in price volatility and more recently, the rapid appreciation of the Canadian dollar. The backdrop to this, however, is that the situation of agriculture producers began deteriorating when the WTO was created, when the Uruguay Round-Trade Agreements were implemented, and as trade became generally more deregulated and liberalized. In fact, the issue of the competitiveness of Canadian agriculture necessarily begs another issue, which we feel is this: Competitive with respect to whom?
Our American neighbours have a much more competitive agricultural sector. However, they also have to deal with Brazil's agricultural sector which, in some areas, is even more competitive. We have to be aware that we practice a northern agriculture which has certain benefits, for example precipitation levels and a high per capita land ratio. However, we neither have the amount of sun that our southern neighbours have nor can we harvest our crops more than once a year.
We feel that the issue of competitiveness of the agricultural sector must also be tied to the issue of State support measures, at both the quantitative and qualitative levels. In that regard the food processing sector is a poor relation when it comes to State support, contrary to the situation in Europe or the United States.
Given that the purpose of the agricultural and agri-food sector is to feed the world, therefore we must also ask ourselves if we have the necessary means to develop agriculture. A recent study by Ms. Isabelle Charron, Assistant Director for Economic Studies, AGÉCO Group, and by Ms. Joëlle Noreau, senior economist with the Fédération des caisses Desjardins du Québec, found that in the past 30 years, the relative increase in the price of food products was less than that of the price of consumer goods.
A according to a recent study by the Canadian Economic Observer, the number of products of Canadian origin that make up the grocery basket of families in this country varies from 58% to 80%. Therefore, one can readily see that the food sector is very efficient—more efficient than most other sectors in Canada.
Moreover, a recent OECD study confirms researchers' findings indicating that the average Canadian family spends less on food in relation to total household spending than a few years ago. This share of total spending is pegged at 9% in Canada, 7% in the United States, 14% in France, 35% in China and 50% in developing countries. From a consumer's standpoint, and despite the recent price hikes associated with market hyper- volatility, our farming and agri-food sectors are clearly efficient.
But the past is not always a good indicator of what lies ahead, so one has to wonder whether Canadian agriculture will not only be subject in future to violent meteorological phenomena associated with climate change, but also to major inflationary and deflationary cycles such as those we experienced in 2008.
This brings me to momagri, a movement dedicated to setting up a World Organization for Agriculture. I would like to call on Mr. Mario Hébert, a senior economist, who will tell you about momagri, and I will come back with a few closing remarks.