Madam Speaker, the changes which the government has introduced to the AIDA program will benefit many producers across the country. We will now be covering negative margins. Negative margins occur when a farm has a particularly bad year and the operation has insufficient revenues to cover variable costs like fuel, machinery repair and chemicals.
What will also help farmers get through these tough times is that they now have the option to make a choice in 1999 of a reference period on which the payment calculation for AIDA is based. They will be able to choose either the previous three years or three of the previous five years where high and low income years are not counted. This is called the Olympic average. This will be a real help to farmers as they will not need to count a low income year that they may have had due to flooding, drought or some other occurrence beyond their control.
Furthermore, in response to industry requests, on January 13 the Government of Canada made a new commitment of up to $1 billion for the next two years to design a new disaster program to assist those producers most in need and to help them get through the tough times the hon. member referred to.
The government continues to improve AIDA in response to input from farmers and members of parliament, such as the hon. member for Lambton—Kent—Middlesex.