Mr. Speaker, I open with the question that I hear most in my riding of Moose Jaw-Lake Centre. Farmers ask me why they have not heard anything about agriculture from Ottawa through the newspapers or on television. I have to be honest and tell them we are not talking about agriculture in Ottawa. Sometimes it is very
difficult for me, being a farmer, to admit that we are not talking or spending very much time on agriculture. That is the question I hear most often in my riding.
I want to talk about two subjects today, safety nets and the farm debt problem.
First, in many cases over the past years we have seen safety nets that have been ill conceived, open to abuse, and poorly planned. I do not believe there is a farmer in this country who wants federal or provincial government agriculture subsidies. All farmers want is a reasonable chance to make some sort of decent living in this country. I do not care which part of Canada they come from.
We have been in the situation over the past number of years where we have been looking at world trade problems, weather related problems and various other problems. That has shifted the focus in many areas so governments have been trying to give financial aid to farmers in poorly planned ways.
We have had safety net programs for many years. We have had GRIP, crop insurance, FSAM, the grain stabilization program, and any number of ad hoc programs, as many as we all care to remember.
We have spent billions of taxpayers' dollars on agriculture subsidies, and yet I still see farmers in Saskatchewan, and I know this is true right across this country, who are losing their farms. I ask myself how we justify spending billions upon billions of dollars and whether there is any effect or any good reason to pour dollars into farm subsidies when there is no reasonable chance of hope for success.
In most cases the programs we have seen are open to abuse. They encourage very poor farming practices. They lack continuity. As I mentioned before, we have jumped in and out of all sorts of different farm programs on almost a yearly basis.
That is generally the problem I see with those kinds of programs. In all cases they are bureaucratic programs, developed by bureaucrats for bureaucrats. They have done very little talking to farmers, listening and hearing what farmers are saying across this country. That is something we need to change. That is the area we need to move to.
As I have said many, many times, farmers are the people who know what programs will work and what programs will not work. They know what is the best way to market their grain. In many cases they know the best way to transport their grain.
I am not being particularly critical of this government. It has been governments of all stripes in the past. We have seen it from all governments.
I generally like the idea of the whole farm concept of some sort of farm insurance. The concept is realistic. The question I have is, what process will be used to develop this program? Will it be bureaucrats again, as we have seen so many times in the past, or will it be consultation with farmers? If it is consultation with farmers in the grassroots area, I am all for that.
I just returned from a meeting of the standing committee on agriculture this morning and we had a group of people in from the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities. They did a provincial summary in Saskatchewan last year listing some of the problems they see with the GRIP and the NISA program.
I will quote the report: "Declining support levels, premiums are too high, not bankable, lack of producer consultation, payment processes too long".
When they talk about NISA they say it is too complicated, the forms are too lengthy, it is poorly administered. They do not trust government with their money; it does not cover all agriculture income and is not suitable for young farmers.
Those are some of the comments the farmers in Saskatchewan are making to groups in Saskatchewan, the problems they have with farm safety net programs.
The second area I want to spend a couple of minutes on is the farm debt problem. In Saskatchewan we have over $5 billion in farm debt. That is Saskatchewan only. In the rural municipality of Craik which is very close to mine, over 50 per cent of the farmers have gone through the farm debt review process. In other words, they have been in serious financial difficulty.
The largest municipal taxpayer in Saskatchewan is the Farm Credit Corporation and the second highest taxpayers are the chartered banks. That gives an indication, a bit of background to the kinds of problems and how serious the debt problem is in this country.
A few years ago we were all witness and subject to many different farm rallies, most of which were held in western Canada, because of the farm debt crisis. We have not seen many of those in the past year or 18 months.
People will say that perhaps the farm debt crisis is over, perhaps it is no longer a problem. We see that cattle prices have gone up. We see that prices for special grains have gone up. Perhaps the crisis is over. I do not believe that.
I believe that the debt crisis is still there and it is still as big as it was before. I think the difference now is that farmers in this country have come to realize if they are going to solve the problems of debt, the problems of marketing and so on and so forth, they will have to do it themselves.
Farmers have to take the initiative to help solve their problems. They are no longer looking for government support the
way they did five or perhaps ten years ago. They realize the way to solutions is to open up the process and let them handle their own problems.
I believe farmers have decided they will take matters into their own hands. That is why we see things such as the huge influx of new crops in our country, specialty crops, crops that we would not have believed we would grow five or ten years ago. We are now growing them. We see a great increase in the cattle industry. We see value added industry. In my own riding we have a good number of various value added industries that are going to be successful because they are farmer owned, they are farmer controlled and they do not depend on government subsidy.
We see a huge increase in off farm jobs, off farm income. A recent survey in Saskatchewan said that as high as 50 per cent of the farmers in Saskatchewan have off farm income. I often humorously say as a farmer that my wife teaches school to support my farming habit. It is a fact of life out there. It is just the way it is. I think that is good. People are starting to realize they have to take matters into their own hands.
I want to spend just a minute talking about the Farm Credit Corporation. It has a new lend-lease program, initiated this year. The comments I have received from my riding, the initial comments, are that it is a good program. Some of the negative comments might be that the term of six years is probably too short and should be increased to 10 years.
The other comment I get about the Farm Credit Corporation which I want to finish with is that it has been very difficult, very bureaucratic to deal with in its history. Many farmers in my area have turned back their land or voluntarily transferred it back to the Farm Credit Corporation over the past few years and it has been very difficult negotiating, coming to terms.
In conclusion, I would like to say that farmers are now preparing for their spring seeding. Right across this country they are busy. They are on their tractors. They are listening to the radio. I think more than anything else they would like to hear on their radios as they are working this spring that there are some specifics, that somebody will stand up and say this is the program, these are the details. That is what they want to hear.
I believe that agri-policy must be developed by farmers for farmers. There is no other way in this country that we can solve some of the problems we face in our industry other than by full consultations with farmers.