Mr. Speaker, I too am very pleased to take part in this important debate today on the crisis in farm income.
I was looking through notes yesterday and we first started to raise these questions in February of this year, continued on through the spring and we certainly have focused on since parliament has come back on this very important crisis in rural Canada in general, in western Canada in particular.
As colleagues have mentioned, net farm income declined by some 84% in my province of Saskatchewan in 1997 and it looks like it is going to fall by another 40% this year.
My colleague, the member for Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, attempted to have an emergency debate on the crisis in farm income on October 5. That was not successful. My colleague, the member for Regina—Qu'Appelle, and I held a news conference in Regina on October 16. We invited some farmers who were particularly hurting from this crisis. Lloyd Pletz who farms north of Bell Prairies was one of those individuals. He told the assembled media that day “I'm finished. I have no way to hang on”. Donnett Elder, who was also attending, has worked in the farm stress area answering phones for the past 10 years and she reports that it has never been worse out there with the phone ringing off the hook from farmers who are terribly concerned about the situation. She is looking at a $40,000 shortfall in 1998.
I mention people like Lloyd Pletz and Donnett Elder because we are attempting to put a face on a very serious and growing crisis.
I know the word crisis is a frequently overused word but it is a word that certainly applies in this instance. The Canadian Federation of Agriculture has noted that net farm income will decline by 40% overall and we are even looking at worse numbers on the prairies. It is incredible when one adds in the 84% loss in Saskatchewan and then add to that 40% to 45% this year. For farmers in Alberta it is 35% and in Manitoba it is 40%. Hog farmers virtually from coast to coast are looking at losses of $40 per animal when they get them to market.
This crisis is largely as a result of economic and trade conditions over the last couple of years. The economic meltdown in southeast Asia has been a large part of it. However, other countries have the same problems, not just Canada. Farmers in European countries and in the United States would face similar problems but their governments have taken steps to cushion the blow and reduce the impact on farmers in those communities.
In Canada we are left with the situation where so far the minister of agriculture agrees that there is a crisis but nobody is yet prepared to do anything about it. It reminds me of the old tea ad “only in Canada, you say”.
The U.S. administration is kicking in $2.857 billion under market loss payments. It begins today to help offset heavy losses resulting from historic low commodity prices, the very same problems many Canadian farmers are facing. European farmers are receiving a subsidy for wheat of up to $205 Canadian a tonne, well above the current projected world price.
We have been told by our senior international trade negotiator that in the United States the subsidy support for wheat farmers is some five times higher for American wheat than what is available to their Canadian counterpart. The bottom line is that Canadian farmers simply cannot compete.
Canadian farmers are as good as any in the world. We hope we have a goal in to double our agricultural exports by 2005 but there is no way Canadian farmers can do that without some help soon from their governments.
I asked yesterday in the House when help was going to be forthcoming to ensure that farmers were planning to plant a spring crop in 1999 rather than planning for an auction sale in the same year.
The United States is pumping up farm subsidies which are not countervails by the WTO or the GATT. Europeans are pumping up, as I noted a minute ago. Here at home help for our farmers has been slashed significantly.
In 1993 when the WTO was negotiated, Canada agreed to reduce its subsidies on agriculture by about a billion dollars over five years. In other words, we are going from $5 billion to $4 billion over the course of five years. In the usual boy scout way that Canada often operates, we have done much better than that. We have slashed some 60% of farm subsidies. We have gone from $5 billion to perhaps $2 billion and some people insist that it is probably less than $1 billion in subsidies at the moment.
We look good on the international stage but our farmers are really in dire straits. They have paid more than their fair share on the war on the deficit. It is time for a reinvestment in agriculture.
In Saskatchewan net farm income is forecast for this year to be $320 million less than it was last year. Just in passing, that is almost exactly what Saskatchewan farmers used to receive from the Crow benefit.
Another aspect of this argument is that Canada has been assisted greatly by Canadian farmers in balancing the books because of our agricultural exports. If there is not some action taken quickly I am very concerned there is a great danger we will end up killing the goose that laid the golden egg.
The minister continually relies on the net income stabilization account and crop insurance. He says that they are very good programs. For the sake of argument I will not disagree with that except to say that they are not answers to the problems we are facing now. NISA and crop insurance were not designed to look after low commodity prices or the ice storm of last year.
Another point the minister makes constant reference to is that most farmers in NISA—and we heard him say that again this morning—on average have some $18,000 in their accounts. I saw some numbers recently in terms of NISA which I would like to share with the House.
Farmers earning between $10,000 and $75,000 per year gross income on their operations account for some 62% of all farmers. The average amount in their NISA accounts is not $18,000 a year. It is not $12,000. It is not even $6,000. The average in the NISA accounts of the smaller farmer is $5,925 per year. It is scarcely worth talking about. It certainly is not a program that can be relied upon to assist farmers in the emergency they find themselves in now.
My time is just about up. We are seeing farm costs increasing sharply. There has been a 21% increase in machinery over the last five years. Fertilizer is up 57% and chemicals, 63%. I asked the minister what he was doing about cost recovery, about the $138 million more that Canadian farmers are paying for things that are not counter to GATT or the WTO.
We in this corner of the House are very concerned that the Liberals are continuing to dismantle rural Canada. The rail system, the transportation system, is in sad shape. The costs are three times higher for shipping grain to the coast.
We are asking for help for the farm sector. We feel that the minister could redeem himself and his government by announcing today that he is prepared to help out farmers with long term disaster relief.