My name is Beverly Stow. My husband, Reg, and I farm at Graysville, on the western edge of Manitoba's Red River Valley. We also still have my home farm at Snowflake, which is in its 131st year of being part of our family.
I wish to thank the committee for hearing our thoughts on the challenges and issues. I will carry on with what I think mostly are challenges.
Oddly enough, it appears that the previous policies of the body now seeking these solutions are, in many ways, responsible for the problem we are attempting to address. Diligent implementation of the royal commission report from the late sixties, which concluded that Canada had too many farmers, coupled with an extremely aggressive—mostly foreign—corporate lobby bound and bent on owning the business of food have gone a long way in producing the current situation.
While there has been decline in all age groups among farmers, the sharpest and most critical decline has been in the group we're talking about today. In Manitoba alone, it has fallen from 7,190 in 1991 to 2,815 in 2006. Looking at other numbers for the same period, an NFU research study reveals that over the past 20 years, adjusted for inflation, farmers have generated $389 per year per acre and have been allowed to keep $1.45 in the same period. Again, over roughly the same timeframe, farmers have tripled their exports but have seen their incomes halved and farm debt skyrocket to the $60 billion range. Disturbingly, these numbers coincide roughly with the period that the FTA and NAFTA have been in force.
Much of the physical, economic, and regulatory infrastructure that sustained Canadian farmers in the period from the twenties to the early nineties is rapidly being eroded, or has already gone. What has replaced it has been an unrelenting downloading of costs onto the producer, with little or no corresponding increase in farm prices.
In the past 12 years, over 3,000 miles of rail have been pulled up in the west, with Canada possibly being the only country in the world moving in this direction. The Crow rate has been lost, and there has been no implementation of joint running rights to ensure a measure of competition. Moreover, there have been persistent attacks on the Canadian Wheat Board, and there is now reason for grave concern about supply management.
Implementation of plant breeders' rights increasingly places at risk farmers' thousands of years' old right to save seed and maintain some measure of control over costs, which is further exacerbated by cutbacks in public plant breeding and the voracious foreign corporate appetite for patents and patent enforcement.
Enormous caps on business risk management programs encourage large farms to grow larger and vastly reduce the opportunity for a young farmer to acquire land. Large caps cause one to wonder, if these large units are working so well, why do they require such infusions from the public purse?
In the marketplace, large farms are given discounts on inputs and premiums on deliveries for which small farmers do not qualify, creating the ludicrous situation of the small farmer paying for the benefits of the large operations.
Together Reg and I have been farming for 47 years. For Reg it will be well over 50 years. Never have we seen the market concentration now faced by farmers. Single companies now own entire supply chains, from the farm gate to the grocery store; and while they are at it, they will sell you your farm inputs, too, in a 21st century version of owing your soul to the company store.
Successive rationalizations have seen exponential increases in the distances farmers must travel to market their product. The two large beef packers remaining in western Canada now pretty much control price through captive supply and unpriced contracts, and they also determine the location of auction marts through distribution of their buyers. For us it's an hour and a half one way to get our cattle to market.
In a region where rail is far and away the most efficient, economical, and environmentally responsible mode for moving large volumes of heavy goods over long distances, farmers are now forced to wheelbarrow their grain to and fro, over roads designed for light vehicles, to whichever company is offering a penny or two more at the time. This, even, is an increasingly rare event, since the few remaining companies—through their periodic rationalizations—have carved out territories among themselves to eliminate any meaningful competition.
This concentration has been achieved through intense corporate lobbying of politicians, the public bureaucracy, and the regulatory system, the most notable of which, the Competition Bureau, seems to have become a rubber stamp for the corporate wish list. Unfortunately, a weak and divided farm lobby is ineffective in the face of a well-paid corporate lobbyist determined to have his way and officials who are equally determined to give it to him.
The entire issue of policy changes appears to have another twist, in that issues that will affect a farmer's livelihood are always addressed when the farm population is seeding, or harvesting, or something else.
Young people, even those who have dreamed all their lives of farming, are finding it increasingly difficult to justify a move to an industry that offers so little prospect of a secure living.
The Easter report, undertaken by the Martin government in 2004-05, addressed many of these issues and suggested plausible solutions. In the intervening years, the situation has become considerably more critical. Dusting that report off, updating it, and implementing its proposals would go a long way to solving the problems before us.
I would close by stressing that the issue at hand is not merely one of disappearing farmers, but goes to national food safety and security, and the dangers of trusting control of Canada's food supply largely to the eager hands of the foreign transnationals. I strongly doubt that when the British government repealed the Corn Laws in 1846, thereby decimating their farmers in favour of manufacturers and commodity traders, they had any idea that early in the following century, their island's supply routes would be blockaded and their citizens threatened with starvation.
Carelessness with farmers and the food supply inevitably ends badly.
