Thank you.
The short answer is yes to the two things you mentioned, income security and food security. There is a growing recognition worldwide around the food sovereignty movement. Food sovereignty is a term that people are going to be hearing more and more in the future. The National Farmers Union works through an international organization called La Via Campesina, which represents millions of farmers worldwide. We have the best working definition of food sovereignty that there is.
I think one of the examples that highlight this discussion was the absolutely absurd situation we had 18 months ago in the spring of 2008, when there were food riots happening on the streets of some 30 countries around the world, and the IMF--based in the United States but representing countries like Canada--was issuing directives in public telling these countries that they needed to keep exporting food out of their own countries, even though their own citizens were rioting in the streets because they had no food. There is no situation that I can think of that more quickly destabilizes any federal government than a situation like that, where you are advocating shipping food out of your country while your own people are starving. That's just a ridiculous notion.
You mentioned farm debt. In the Doha round there's a lot of talk about development; it's a development round. The notion is that farmers in developing countries should have some special considerations that farmers in other countries like Canada don't have. Of course there's no firm definition of what a developing country is. According to the trade negotiators, they are self-identifying. You can make the argument that all farmers worldwide, including Canadian farmers, are developing world farmers, because the thing that separates us from other farmers in the world--whether it's Africa or some other place where we would think of the farmers as being in a different situation--is $60 billion worth of debt. Canadian farmers are operating on $60 billion worth of debt. That means, in very round figures, interest payments of $3.5 billion a year.
In Canada the long-term average net farm income from the markets is $125 million. So farmers have to pay down the principal on that $60 billion worth of debt out of that $125 million per year. Using today's numbers, it would take 500 years for farmers to use their farm income to pay down that debt. It's a bubble. Lenders are still lending into the agricultural market because they think these transfers from government, the taxpayers, are going to increase over time and they think they can maintain their position even if they just get the interest back, not necessarily the principal.
We're consistently told that we have to look at farming as a business, that it's not somehow different; it's just a business. If you look at the business of farming, we're trying to pay down $60 billion worth of debt on a net income of $125 million per year. It does not work.