Thank you.
The National Farmers Union welcomes the opportunity to contribute to this finance committee pre-budget consultation.
The NFU is a voluntary, direct membership, non-partisan national farm organization made up of thousands of farm families from across Canada who produce a wide variety of goods, including grains, livestock, fruit and vegetables.
The NFU was founded in 1969, with its roots going back more than a century. As a general farm organization, our membership reflects the diversity of production systems, farm sizes and farmer demographics across the country. We promote food sovereignty, which is a holistic approach that puts people, food and nature in the centre of the policy picture. That makes democratic control of the food system its priority.
The NFU promotes policies that will maintain family farms as the primary food producers in Canada. The NFU believes agriculture should be economically, socially and environmentally sustainable, and that food production should lead to healthy food for people, enriched soils, a more beautiful countryside, jobs for non-farmers, thriving rural communities and biodiverse natural ecosystems.
The NFU is a leader in articulating the interests of Canadian family farms in analyzing the farms' income crisis, and in proposing affordable, balanced, innovative solutions to basic benefits that benefit all citizens. NFU policy positions are developed through a democratic process by debate, and voting on resolutions at regional and national conventions as governed by our constitution.
Canada's budget 2019 offers the opportunity to fund significant federal policy initiatives to enhance agriculture's role as an economic driver by ensuring farm incomes and farm-created wealth are available to benefit Canadians and their communities. In our submission, we outline ways the federal government can revamp programs and taxation measures to better support multi-functional, while promoting domestic production, and reversing the decline in the number of farmers.
We begin by recommending Canada set an ambitious goal of replacing one-third of Canada's food imports with domestic production. This would bring over 15 billion food dollars back into our economy to foster economic diversification and rural revitalization. It will also answer consumers' desire for more wholesome food produced by Canadian farmers. We just had a farm day in the city yesterday. The streets were just packed here with local food and the interest was really welcoming. That support from people is out there to move in this direction.
We're concerned about the loss of farmers and the funding that's happening now. There is quite an increase in the concentration of farmland within Canada. We've also seen that in P.E.I., even though we have a Lands Protection Act. Our government has, more or less, not really lived up to the spirit of that act, which we find is really too bad. There is a lot of foreign interest coming here, and it's pretty hard for local farmers to compete in that type of situation.
We would like to be involved in helping younger farmers with some income insurance plans for beginning farmers. It's pretty difficult for younger farmers and newer farmers to come in just because of the amount of cash involved in machinery and land. Everything is just incredibly expensive. It's beyond the means of a lot of younger farmers in terms of doing it.
We think there needs to be quite a bit of support in this direction. If we had a guaranteed income, which I think your government has kind of supported, and some of the others are talking about, it would be excellent in encouraging younger farmers to get through the initial stages and be able to stay on the farm to produce the food we need.
We also think it's very important to have a land quota trust set up, so that retiring farmers can have some support, while at the same time that intergenerational transfer of land is not so burdensome to the younger generation coming in. If this were set up, it would create a good opportunity there to ensure that some of the land will stay in agriculture production. It will be there for our next generation to produce food on the land for everybody.
I'm just summarizing stuff here. I know the paper's a little too long and we only have five to 10 minutes.
One of the things that we're quite concerned about, and that we very much back, is supply management. We were quite shocked this morning to hear the reference to it in the news. I guess some you were also. It's unfortunate that we caved in to Trump in some of those aspects where we're giving up quite a bit of our dairy supply to the U.S. We've already given up a significant amount to the Europeans and to the TPP. I think the total of some of those, even the ones today, would have meant the total production of Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia. It's not just an insignificant amount that's happening there. It's putting significant pressure on our dairy farmers who have to operate within finances that haven't been changed in a lot of years, and they keep getting reduced.
If my colleague, Doug, was here.... He's a dairy farmer. He must have had some problems coming in. I was talking to him this morning. He's on his way; he will be here. He could bring you more up to date on some of those things that are happening there.
We'd like to see a single-desk selling process initiated for many other commodities and many other farm products in Canada. We think that would be a really important way to stabilize the system. We were quite disappointed that we lost the Canadian Wheat Board. It was an example of that. We probably lost incredible millions of dollars out of our rural economy because of that. All those assets are going to Saudi Arabian companies and other places. It just didn't make sense that our previous government did this. We think it would be much better if we brought back some single-desk selling approaches like this. It would make a tremendous difference in the development of our farm economy.
We'd like to see some funds directed to doing it for the public interest. We think a lot of times, particularly with universities and others, it's more or less working to the advantage of some of the much larger transnationals that are involved in doing the research for their own particular benefit. We're not seeing it for the public interest. We'd like to see some changes in that direction.
We'd like to promote integrated pest management. We think many aspects like this will make for a healthier society here and for the future. We can see some of the environmental degradation and we have some examples of that on our island here. We're making moves to be able to try to change that now. Even a lot of larger potato farmers are recognizing the importance of having livestock and manure on the land, and increasing our organic matter in our soils. We just had a 10-year study here and we're looking at a fairly decreased organic matter content. That plays a significant role in the deterioration of our soil. We're looking at measures to be able to reverse that and to rebuild our soil and help us with many other environmental aspects of things here because of some of the fish kills and other things that have happened. It's very important for our long-term viability that we take those into consideration.
I'll close with that, if you have questions later.