I want to thank the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food for having us and for giving us the opportunity to comment on the Growing Forward program.
I want to begin by saying that the AgriInvest program fulfils a request made by Quebec farm producers. It provides relative stability and allows producers to assume a certain level of risk. The program does a relatively good job of meeting the needs of certain groups of Quebec producers. However, we are not at all satisfied with the AgriStability program, which replaced the CAIS, or the Canadian Agricultural Income Stabilization program.
With certain types of production, the margins have been low for more than three years, but the program no longer does anything. It causes a great many problems for agribusinesses in terms of security, stability and production continuity. The best example is the pork sector, which is in the middle of a crisis this year, and the AgriStability program is no longer meeting the needs of businesses in that sector.
We have tried to get an AgriFlex program. Our hope was that it would provide risk coverage and some flexibility in terms of the provinces and in terms of the types of production that would allow us to obtain what AgriStability does not cover, in other words, the margin phenomenon, when periods of insufficient income last longer. Unfortunately, because of how it was structured, AgriFlex is not part of a risk management program. We are definitely going to ask for enhancements to the AgriStability program in order to improve reference margins. Reference margins need to reflect the production costs of agribusinesses more, thereby providing a certain level of stability.
There is no question that we can use the AgriFlex program, as it was announced, in terms of aspects that enhance certain other more substantive programs. It has the potential to become a collective means of providing structure. This program can still play a role, but not as far as its current underlying principles go. It, too, needs to be improved so as to provide more flexibility and consistency, in terms of a collective measure.
As for the AgriRecovery program, certain problems can be identified with respect to the types of production subject to supply management. AgriRecovery needs to be improved in order to specifically address certain problems that have already been identified. More work in that respect is probably necessary. We have experienced some serious problems in the past few years, including nematodes in the potato industry. The AgriRecovery program was created to provide a framework, but when it comes to applying it in real life, agribusinesses have a very hard time qualifying for the program and thus accessing assistance that meets their needs.