I hear the comment from the other side. I agree it is a shame. Farmers today work hard and deserve a fair return for their product. The biggest problem that I see right now within the farming sector is that farmers have become price takers. They are told what they will get for their product, whether it is fair or not, and that is it.
The international subsidy war we are into right now is about as bad as what it was in 1984. It has to be rectified or we will lose a base industry called agriculture. The agri-food industry is second only to our automotive industry.
My colleagues and I are working hard to make sure that does not happen. There is a clock ticking right now and it is called spring planting. We have 60 to 90 days. At that point in time a challenge will face the government, members of the House and those on the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food and the Standing Committee on Finance because there will have to be money for this. How do we help farmers get the seeds in the ground when they have to be planted? That is the question.
I am a member of parliament from Ontario and I am still an active farmer. Each year I hold an agriculture round table at the OAC in Guelph. It was held on January 17 of this year, at which point in time we discussed a number of initiatives. We discussed research and development in Ontario and Canada. Twenty-four commodity groups representing the agricultural industry in Ontario and six members of parliament were sitting on a panel listening to their problems and discussing the solutions. We affectionately call the exercise a brick and a bouquet meeting.
We do not have the press there. It is a kitchen table meeting with farmers sitting around the table, talking about agriculture and the problems facing it today. Yes, we come up with solutions to different problems. We discuss biotechnology, which is a major issue for our industry right now. A number of ideas and concerns came forward in that regard.
We discussed the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. We discussed the environment and the fact that farmers in Ontario think that the environmental farm plan is an excellent program that was put forward by CARD and should be continued instead of being cancelled on March 31, 2001.
If people have read the paper as to the environment issues facing agriculture, Walkerton for instance, the environmental farm plan sets a good basis for the agricultural industry to work from, to work on issues like nutrient management.
We also discussed at great length the farm income safety nets and agricultural trade issues. We looked at the fact that right now the federal government, through the Canada farm income program, is putting in $3.3 billion over the next three years. The provinces are also stepping up to the plate to the tune of $2.2 billion, making a total program expenditure over the next three years of $5.5 billion.
We discussed programs like NISA, crop insurance, fall cash advances and province specific companion programs like market revenue. We discussed the issue that Ontario producers will receive $3.3 billion in federal support for core safety net programs, which is an increase of 30% over the previous allotment.
We also discussed the issue of the WTO negotiations. We have a lot of concerns about subsidies because that is the biggest problem for the commodity prices right now. It is causing overproduction and downward pressure on commodity prices.
One of the issues that came out loud and clear last year during the 11 meetings held across Ontario with the grain and oilseed producers was the fact that after the cost of putting their seed in the ground, the escalating costs of diesel fuel, the cost of their time and the depreciation on equipment, there was nothing left over. They in fact said that they were in the red. They said that they could only keep that up for a certain amount of time before the bank would be at the front gate and it would be 1984 all over again.
As soon as the committees are up and running, those are the issues that we as a government have to look at immediately. I see it as a two pronged point. I go back to crisis management. We have a crisis that will happen this spring and, quite frankly, we need solution within the next 60 days to answer that crisis. We have to go a step past that to make sure that we have long term programs in place so we do not keep going from crisis to crisis within the agricultural sector.
The general consensus that came from the meeting in Guelph, after we had looked at all the programs that are in place, was that we do not need new programs. What we need are the programs, which are in place right now, to respond more quickly, to require less paperwork and to have more money incorporated in them in order to address the problems that the growers are facing right now. If that is done within the next 60 days or within this term, I believe we will be able to deal with and move beyond the crisis management in agriculture.