Mr. Chairman, members of Parliament, thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today. My name is Erin Fletcher. I am a member of the Ontario-Quebec Grain Farmers' Coalition, representing 41,000 farmers from Windsor to Rimouski. I am the manager of government relations and public affairs for the Grain Farmers of Ontario.
I am joined by William Van Tassel, who is the president of the Ontario-Quebec Grain Farmers' Coalition.
I feel very fortunate to be in this industry. The recent trends are positive for agriculture. The local-food movement has encouraged consumers to buy locally, and in these difficult economic times, the demand for our food is not going anywhere—as our population grows, the demand for our food increases.
We have been encouraged at times by the commitment the government has made to agriculture in Canada. We appreciate the efforts of the ministry in expanding marketing opportunities internationally for our products. We are also encouraged by the replacement of CAIS with the Growing Forward agenda. This is a step in the right direction.
While the trends in agriculture are positive, the challenges are numerous. As we have witnessed in the past couple of years, commodity prices have fluctuated wildly, as has the Canadian dollar. In many cases, the cost of production has exceeded the price of commodities. As grain farmers in Ontario and Quebec, we are subject to international market trends and competitors that directly subsidize farmers. And this has been the case for many decades. Another challenge in farming is the overlap of provincial and federal responsibility; one jurisdiction points to the other when confronted with difficult policy decisions.
We do wish to remind you that we have significant experience managing through economic turmoil and volatility. Also, you cannot look at agriculture one year at a time, as not too long ago we were barely able to stay in business—grain prices were significantly lower, and inputs like fertilizer and oil were high and contributed to declining and negative margins.
So we are here to offer our experience to the government on agricultural programming. At the last federal-provincial-territorial agriculture meeting in July, the provincial ministers asked the federal government to undertake a review of risk management programs and to involve industry in the study.
The Ontario-Quebec Grain Farmers' Coalition will be focusing on the federal agricultural program called AgriFlex. AgriFlex, or the agricultural flexibility program, was announced in budget 2009. We were disappointed in this announcement, however, as the business risk management component was excluded.