Thank you, Mr. Chair and committee members, for the opportunity to speak to you today.
My name is Mary Robinson. I'm part of the sixth generation of my family to farm in Prince Edward Island, and I'm also the president of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture. Our federation represents roughly 200,000 Canadian farm families and has been in existence since 1935.
To start, I want to say thanks and to acknowledge the work of Canadian governments at all levels. Public servants and elected officials have been working 24-7 to help Canadians and keep them safe during these difficult times.
These coming weeks and months are critical if we are to ensure Canada's domestic food supply is secure both now and into the future.
The federal government has designed and executed many programs for businesses and Canadian individuals. We are talking today about how we can bring this ingenuity and commitment to support our farmers and food businesses in their continued commitment to providing an adequate and affordable Canadian food supply. We believe the resilience, adequacy and affordability of Canada's food supply is a critical public health objective for all Canadians, second only to the direct health care response to COVID-19 itself.
The COVID-19 crisis continues to generate significant challenges and uncertainty throughout the agri-food sector, with potentially devastating impacts on farmers from coast to coast. As leaders, we have an obligation to plan for the worst and drive for the best.
To understand the impacts of COVID-19, the CFA, through a survey of members and other national commodity associations, identified $2.6 billion in projected short-term financial losses across the Canadian agri-food sector nearly two months ago.
To date, the government has announced a number of initiatives for the sector, including a series of measures intending to increase credit availability for the sector, alongside the May 5 announcement of $252 million in assistance, while committing to further funding announcements in support of the sector. While critically important to the sector, the funding relief to date falls well short of the sector's overall need, as there are a number of outstanding issues facing Canadian farmers.
Today, I will speak to these outstanding issues, shortfalls in programming and what's needed to ensure we don't see any unnecessary loss of food production during this crisis, which continues to place unprecedented stress on food supply chains around the world.
For the first time in generations, serious questions have been raised in Canada about food supply chains and our food security. Canadian farmers continue to make daily decisions with regard to their businesses and the production of Canadian agricultural products, while confronting both the immediate and the longer-term challenges COVID-19 has introduced to the sector.
These include the continued threat of processing disruptions, reducing supply chain capacity and increasing costs due to production backlogs; the temporary loss of the food service industry and its long road to recovery, which has seen a key market for many agricultural producers lost, in large part for the foreseeable future; unfilled job vacancies throughout the agri-food supply chain, further challenged by the possibility of COVID occurrences in the workforce; unprecedented market volatility; rising costs in both the farm and the food processing industries, as these essential businesses continue to put in place a number of COVID-related measures; and closure of sector-specific markets that can have devastating implications for subsectors of Canadian agriculture.
The CFA has proposed a number of specific policy measures to help address challenges faced by the sector during COVID-19. A brief will be submitted to the clerk shortly, with a detailed breakdown of these measures. Given the short time I have today, I would like to focus on three key areas.
The first is the need for enhanced business risk management coverage to ensure producers have support to overcome supply chain disruptions, address rising costs and, ultimately, manage pressures to scale back production. The CFA believes that changes to BRM programs are the most efficient, comprehensive and targeted means of assisting producers with both the immediate and the longer-term challenges posed by COVID-19, in addition to the range of broad-spectrum challenges already confronting the sector, such as closures of key international markets, increasing weather-related risks due to climate change and an overall rise in the capital requirements and costs involved in agricultural production.
Had BRM programs been operating effectively, the CFA's view is that the program would have responded to up to 75% of the $2.6 billion in projected short-term financial losses referenced earlier. However, in the absence of these improvements, we continue to see a lack of trust among producers as to the ability of these programs to respond to the challenges they're experiencing, resulting in low program enrolment and a myriad of requests for ad hoc support.
Through years of research, most of the solutions to fix the BRM suite are already known. Now it is a matter of the Government of Canada sitting down with its provincial counterparts and committing to a concrete timeline to fix these programs in concert with key stakeholders. In the absence of those timely reforms, Canadian farmers need urgent clarity on how government plans to respond to rising costs associated with producing food, uncertain access to labour and loss of critical markets for many agricultural products.
Second, in addition to the challenges directly confronting primary agriculture, there's a continued need to provide further support for food processors to mitigate the likelihood of COVID-related supply chain disruptions across the sector. While we were pleased to see the announcement of $77 million for food processors, our supply chain partners have indicated that this is inadequate, with significant food and financial losses expected to follow any future disruption.
Industry assessments of the additional costs confronting food processors greatly exceed the funding made available to date, with businesses continuing to take on sizeable investments and changes to safeguard the health and safety of their workforce. Our concern is that the smaller regional processors, further processors and grower-packer operations that are so vital to so many supply chains may lose out if demand as currently expected greatly exceeds the existing funding support available. CFA is calling for urgent additional financial support to assist these businesses in retrofitting facilities to maintain capacity and support workplace safety.
Third, where disruptions either have or will take place, CFA is calling for the timely introduction of additional funding beyond the $50-million food surplus program to ensure there is logistical support to address existing and anticipated surpluses. This support must be coupled with an immediate “buy Canadian” campaign to prevent farmers from further scaling back production due to loss of the food services industry, by highlighting the wealth and diversity of Canadian food products available through retail channels. Such a campaign would not only help respond to the loss of vital food service markets for many farmers and food businesses, but would play a vital role in educating Canadians about how food gets to their plates at a time when Canadians are already paying more attention to their food supply. This would also provide an important platform to support the promotion of greater food literacy at a time when Canadians are cooking more at home and the affordability of food is a growing concern.
We believe these measures, and those in our forthcoming brief, work hand in hand to help maintain capacity and ensure Canada's agri-food sector is doing everything it can to put food on the plates of Canadians and consumers around the world during these difficult times.
Canadian farmers take pride in the fact that every day we feed Canadians. Like most sectors of the Canadian economy, farmers have felt the tremendous pain brought about by the unprecedented COVID-19 crisis. We will always work as partners with government to make nutritious and affordable food for all Canadians.
I thank you for your time.