Madam Speaker, it has been said by a former minister of agriculture in this place that if three farmers were to agree, two of them would have to be dead first. When it comes to the agricultural policy framework, the government has managed the near impossible, because farm leaders are virtually unanimous in their opposition to the risk management program being foisted upon them by the federal Department of Agriculture.
At a time when farm incomes are under severe stress, at a time when farmers really need a safety net, the government is proposing new safety programs that offer considerably less than what has existed heretofore. Does this happen at a time when agriculture is booming? Hardly.
The first thing to say is that farmers and rural communities are hurting as never before. Realized net farm income across Canada for 2002 will be well below that of the previous year and certainly below the five year average. In the province of Saskatchewan where I come from, realized net farm income is predicted to reach record low levels when the numbers are announced late next month.
We would expect under such circumstances that a government with a handsome surplus would be coming to the assistance of farmers in their time of need but that is not what is happening. Federal spending on agriculture today is approximately half of what it was just a dozen years ago. In terms of total government spending, the amount spent on agriculture has fallen from 2.8% of overall spending 12 years ago to 1.4% in the current budget.
About 10 months ago the Prime Minister announced the agricultural policy framework with great fanfare. He said Ottawa was providing more than $5.2 billion toward a long time fix for agriculture. The fix was that much of the new money so-called, was earmarked for items in the agricultural policy framework, things such as improving water supplies, environmental plans and export markets but very little actually went into the pockets of farmers to help solve the drought and the cost price squeeze that they face.
To make matters worse, we have the high subsidies from international areas, the United States and Europe in particular. The United States is now subsidizing pulse crops. There is no other country in the world that subsidizes pulse crops except the dear old U.S.A.
Canadian farmers are suffering a trade injury that amounts to an estimated $1.3 billion a year as a result of these subsidies. Farmers and their organizations, as well as provincial governments, have been pleading with the government to provide compensation to cover off that amount. However, the Minister of Agriculture went out of his way last June to say that the APF did not relate to trade injury, a point that was reinforced in the recent federal budget.
Farmers and farm organizations and provincial governments were all uneasy about last June's announcement. They heard the sizzle; they have not yet seen the steak and they are definitely not eating much of it.
The new agricultural policy will revamp NISA and will put a greater emphasis on crop insurance. Farmers have done their homework and they find that in the future they will be paying more and receiving even less in disaster protection than they currently receive.
The government, we would submit, is engaged in a public relations smokescreen to create an illusion that there is genuine consultation while all the while the department intends to go its own way on a policy that is really aimed at allowing the government to spend less in perpetuity on the farm community. Some 22 groups took the highly unusual step of bypassing the agriculture minister completely and writing directly to the Prime Minister. They told him in effect that they were being ignored.
They asked and the provinces have asked that the current safety net programs be allowed to remain in place for an additional period of time, one more year, while real consultations and negotiations occur. The minister kept promising that he would have new--