Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Welcome, folks.
Mr. Meredith, in your remarks you talked about being basically bottom line, more innovative, and more productive. You said that our producers are among the most efficient in the world. I don't disagree with that. They are productive.
But that has been the answer spelled out by governments since 1970, when I started in this racket: just be more productive and things will be all right. Well, that hasn't solved the profitability problem on the farm, for a number of reasons.
In fact, if you do some research, every economic indicator is positive, whether it's production per acre, exports, output per farmer, cost per unit, or whatever, except for one indicator, and that's net farm income. It just isn't there, in many cases.
Ms. Moritz, you threw a lot of numbers out there, but the key is what it means on the farm for the primary producers and their families. Regardless of the money spent on hogs and beef, the numbers sound decent, but they're not.
Canada is not standing up to the rest of the world in terms of our support for our agriculture sector versus the rest of the world. Those are the facts. I'm not blaming the minister. I'm not blaming the department. But I think we have a town here that's run by the Department of Finance, and they don't understand agriculture.
Yesterday, Peter Clark put out a release on American subsidies, and this it what it says. Peter Clark's company found that “U.S. federal, state and local governments continue to subsidize their agriculture industries with a labyrinth of programs that are conservatively estimated at over US $180 billion in 2009”.That means they're somewhere between 200% and 300% higher than they are for Canadian farms.
Yesterday, in The Globe and Mail, we saw that investment companies are buying the land out from under farmers in Canada and in other countries around the world. Farmers are becoming serfs, really, on their own Canadian land.
I make those points because this government and previous governments, in my view, in the past 20 years have never done enough at the primary production level, regardless of the numbers you've mentioned.
I want to go to some of the programs that are in place. The most worrisome at the moment are the repayment conditions for the emergency advances. The repayments had to start June 1, 2011 for cattle and had to be paid back over ten months. For hogs, it starts March 31, 2012. I'm told by industry in my province that 80% of the industry will go into default if those conditions remain in place. Somewhere around 50% of the industry is in Ontario.
Now, are there other options being considered? What can be done here to assist these farmers? The program was announced. They said that when economic conditions improve, repayments will be returned. This will drive more producers out of business, especially in eastern Canada. They don't have the program that was put in place in Alberta. What are the other options to keep farmers in business instead of this fixed timeframe payment?