Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound.
I appreciate the fact that the member for Richmond—Arthabaska has brought this forward tonight. I get to work with him on agriculture committee. Most of the work we do is very non-partisan. We work at trying to make an impact, which will create an improvement in the conditions facing the agriculture industry.
I am a cattle producer. Members of my family are ranchers. I represent a riding that has over 2,500 ranch families. I am living this crisis. We know how bad it is. I hear from all my producers on a continuous basis about the challenges they face. They know there is no way the entire problem can be fixed by government. They know there is a lot of things that have to change in the marketplace. They know we need more access to export markets and we definitely have to see a devaluation in the Canadian dollar.
Our livestock producers, hogs and cattle producers, are the best in the world. I am proud of the product they produce and the way they produce it. They have been excellent in ensuring they have been taking a responsible approach in dealing with this crisis and suggesting ideas to government and to our agriculture committee on how to move forward.
I take exception to some of the comments that were made earlier today. The member for Malpeque, in my opinion, made some unfair comments about our Prime Minister. I have had many discussions with the Prime Minister on this crisis. He understands it all too well. A lot of people often forget that his in-laws are ranchers in Alberta. He hears from them personally about the challenges they face.
I have been hearing some really sad stories about how bad this crisis is getting. There is no question that when we see people who have been professional ranchers and cattle breeders for 40, 50 years, struggling to pay the bills, or trying to put the fuel in the tractor so they can feed their cattle, things have done to help them, and our government has started taking steps to meet those needs.
It has created a real problem. Two-thirds of my agriculture based riding is ranch based. No new farmers are interested in coming in and taking over those farms and ranches. There is no opportunity to diversify the operation. We cannot bust up this native land and turn it into crop land. There just is not any quality in it. My own farm is that way. There is only a couple of inches of topsoil and then it is all rocks, gravel and sand underneath. We cannot break up the land and do anything but raise cattle on it.
We have to look at the long term health of the industry, not just the short term crisis. Most producers realize that. They also realize we are not in this by ourselves. This is happening around the world. The U.S. market dictates world price on beef and hogs, and our competitors, whether it is Brazil, Argentina, the Europeans, Australia or New Zealand, have felt this first-hand. There is no doubt that any measure we take here is watched by them.
In the recent conversations I have had with parliamentarians from New Zealand, Australia, Chile and Mexico, they watch what steps we take. They do not have the resources to put money into their agriculture industry, but they will not hesitate to use trade action under our various trade agreements to take away any benefit we provide for our farmers.
My producers do not want to see, and I do not want to see as a producer, the government put out an ad hoc cash payment into the farmers just to see it sucked away by another foreign government in the countervailing duty, or worse yet, see them take advantage of us, as we saw through the BSE crisis, and have those dollars disappear into the packing industry. We need to have a long term, viable outlook on how we move forward with an industry.
Just at the end of last year, the Europeans, in my opinion, made a very grave mistake, one that we unfortunately cannot rectify, moving forward with export subsidies on pork. That is definitely unfair to the rest of the world. The minister has written to the EU Commissioner of Agriculture and Rural Development expressing our concerns as a country and asking that they reconsider these export subsidies. Offloading one's problems onto the rest the world is no way to fix a problem like we are facing today. These problems have to be resolved head on, and that is not what the Europeans are doing.
There is no doubt about what we need. Some headway was made just last week on the WTO deal. For the livestock industry, cattle and pork, we have to have a successful conclusion to opening up markets, reducing export subsidies, reducing production distorting subsidies, and addressing that need. Canada was a lead in developing the last paper coming out of WTO, and it really starts the process in getting us to where we want to be in the Canadian position and in definitely helping out our export based industries.
Over 80% of producers in this country depend upon export markets. Cattle, hogs, grains and oilseeds producers export over 50% of what they produce. We have to have access to it. A recent study by the George Morris Centre, when it looked at the WTO modalities text, translated that into what it is going to be as a potential benefit to Canadian exporting producers. It is saying that commodity prices in Canada will increase $8 billion to $11 billion a year, which is a $3 billion annual increase. We are not talking peanuts here. This is the type of relief we need to see in the industry. We have to have markets opened so that our producers can access those more lucrative markets and put more dollars in their pockets.
The government has also been active in market development, not just in the WTO talks, but the hon. Secretary of State for Agriculture signed a letter of intent in Spain on agri-food and agriculture. He also spent time with the France ministry to talk about opportunities in trade, and also to raise the issue of the European Union subsidies on pork, and asking them to reconsider that move.
The Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food also recently met with his Mexican counterparts to discuss our strategic position as NAFTA partners, but also on moving North American beef around the world. We do have some joint concerns about the U.S. farm bill and how that distorts the marketplace as well. We do not want to see things like country of origin labelling, which would be even more detrimental to our cattle and pork industries here.
Also, members should not forget that in November the minister had discussions with his international counterparts at the Food and Agriculture Organization biannual meeting. He has also had bilateral discussions with the U.S. Acting Secretary of Agriculture, Charles Conner, in making sure that we have a firm commitment to the beef trade moving smoothly between our two borders. They talked about the pool issues and also about the temporary meat testing measures they had put on Canadian products.
I am proud of the work that we have done in committee. Last fall we took a very serious look at all the problems facing the livestock producers. We put a lot of thought into it. Many of the members here discussed this earlier. We presented a report in the House, and the government has already acted upon some of those recommendations.
Since that time we have also had a follow-up meeting with the cattle and hog industries to talk about some of the issues. As always, as I experienced as a producer under the former Liberal government, no program is perfect, and never is it going to meet all the needs. Sometimes we have to tweak them and change them and put them into place.
The cattle industry has been in crisis since the BSE crisis in 2003. I felt that first, and I know that during the BSE crisis the amount of assistance that actually flowed through government programs from the previous government was virtually nil. In talking to ranchers across my riding, the only actual relief they saw in payments through government programs were directly related to the drought that we experienced in Manitoba in 2003, not the actual BSE crisis. Because they had to buy extra feed, they were able to trigger payments from CAIS. It had absolutely nothing to do with the depression they experienced in cattle prices.
The market is something we have to see an improvement in. There are a number of ways we can help in the short term, and the government has already started acted upon it.
The first one that we asked for was interest-free loans to be paid back over a period of three to five years, and to make sure that there are bankable advances to the hog and cattle producers. Like any program, we had to get those running quickly. Under the existing cash advance program, we could not do that because it only applied to grains and oilseeds.