with Tom Manley, agriculture advocate and candidate for
Stormont-Dundas-Charlottenburgh, today proposed a new deal for
agriculture. "Contrary to current governments, we cannot treat farming
like any other business. Agriculture needs unique regulatory and
economic structures to be sustainable and feed our people." (See
background material attached.)
Tom Manley expressed grave concerns for the future of farming: "We
must address several problems such as an over-reliance on fragile
foreign markets and concentration in production and agri-business that
are choking farmers and threatening our food security and food
sovereignty."
Manley is building on a combination of direct experience in
agriculture and ongoing consultations with farmers and farm leaders.
Among these contacts, on September 5th, he consulted with Peter
Dowling, Ontario Coordinator, and several directors for the National
Farmers Union. On September 12th, he listened to the concerns and
recommendations from Elbert van Donkersgoed, Strategic Policy Advisor
of the Christian Farmers Federation of Ontario.
Manley expressed appreciation for the open and frank input from the
farm sector. "From the NFU's brief, I have confirmed that youth cannot
enter agriculture because of the high cost of quota and resources, and
the lack of education and extension services. Concentration in the
agri-food sector, such as the loss of small abattoirs, cuts off
markets and manipulates the price thus eliminating family farms and
the essential lifeblood in our rural communities."
The CFFO's Vision For Farming document is clear about the need to
support the family farm thru effective marketing legislation and a
fair share of the consumer's food dollar. It highlights our society's
need to compensate for the many health, community and environmental
services provided by sustainable agricultural practices beyond the
production of cheap food. A new deal must be negotiated through the
supply line from farmers to consumers to save the family farm and
provide high quality nutritious food.
Furthermore, Manley listened to farmers on September 15th at an
important meeting in St-Albert about the border closures following one
case of BSE. His exchanges with Bob Friesen, President of the Canadian
Federation of Agriculture, and Ron Bonnett, President of the Ontario
Federation of Agriculture, confirmed the necessary paradigm shift in
agriculture. "Free and fair trade does not exist. We need a new deal
for farmers. We need to serve and manage our home market."
To move agriculture into a new paradigm, Tom Manley affirmed his
commitment to develop a sustainable agriculture vision for the Green
Party of Ontario. The GPO wants a new deal for farmers and Manley
identified a preliminary list of essential elements:
* Accept the fact that Free and Fair Trade does not exist. We must
focus on producing what we eat and eating what we produce.
* Re-direct our international efforts to mutually agreeable bilateral
trade deals.
* Support and expand supply management to ensure fair, stable and
orderly marketing within our domestic space.
* Evolve and diversify supply management to facilitate new entrants,
niche and value added marketing, new-age cooperative ventures,
seasonal and low-volume production, direct-to-consumer marketing, and
identity preservation of a greater variety of foods.
* Adapt food safety regulations and inspections for small scale and
on-farm processing.
* Require enhanced mandatory food labelling including genetic
modification, food additives, and nutritional values.
* Ban the sub-therapeutic use of antibiotics and growth hormones.
* Support the implementation of ecological and organic farming
practices.
* Integrate ecological services into agriculture for the benefit of
all citizens.
* In accordance with the GPO's policy of total cost accounting, ensure
that the price of food includes the true cost of food production,
including sustainable practices and ecological services. We need to
explore mechanisms to ensure a farmer's fair share of the real food
price while ensuring food security for all Canadians.
* Re-structure risk management programs to promote bio-diversity,
diversified family farms, and better risk management on our farms.
* Develop unique definitions and policies for the farm versus an
industrial activity (hog farm versus hog factory) to better support
genuine sustainable farm operations.
* Fund effective extension services and independent research and
agricultural education.
* Properly fund adapted rural services in education, health and
community development.
Tom Manley
The Green Party of Ontario
Agriculture Advocate
Candidate, Stormont-Dundas-Charlottenburgh
PO Box 39, Berwick Ont K0C 1G0
work: 613-984-0480 / home: 613-984-0489
[email protected]
www.GreensofSDG.ca
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BACKGROUND INFORMATION
September 17th, 2003
FARMING IS NOT LIKE ANY OTHER BUSINESS
Contrary to contemporary thinking by current governments, we cannot
treat agriculture and farming like any other business. Farmers cannot
simply get big or get out! Several aspects make farming distinct:
1. Businesses, factories and service companies control a process in
relative isolation from the natural world. As long as they install
appropriate filters of all types, they reduce or even eliminate
influence from and impacts on the natural world.
On the contrary, farms inherently depend on and operate in the natural
world. Farmers do not produce food, nature produces it; farmers only
manage and enable an eco-system.
While most businesses can manage and reduce their environmental
footprint, farmers depend on it. Their footprint is the farm. Farming
has the greatest potential, of all sectors except perhaps electricity
generation, to enhance or destroy our environment.
2. Being isolated from the natural world, businesses have predictable
mathematical results: input, process, output. Everything is engineered
with relative precision and the production results are generally
reliable.
Farmers can only set the stage for nature to do its best. Results are
unreliable and very risky as a result of uncontrollable factors:
weather, pests, disease, soil conditions, microbial activities.
Farmers manage a complex biological process; they do not manufacture
widgets. A change in one factor has complex and perhaps unpredictable
repercussions. The farm's eco-system is alive and reacts in complex
ways to the farmer's intervention.
3. Conventional markets contract and expend depending on technology,
fashion, economic trends, family income. Businesses evolve, adapt, and
compete. Labour moves among employers and industries.
The supply-demand equation in farming is not elastic. As a whole, the
food market cannot expand not shrink as people usually eat about the
same amount of food every day, all year, with the exception of extreme
poverty. Farmers must continue to produce even in hard economic times.
Farmers cannot easily turn off the cows, lay off the chickens nor shut
down the corn field.
4. Many industrial sectors, including food processing, have protection
through intellectual property. It creates barriers to entry and gives
the innovator market power. The protection allows the manufacturer to
build advertising, training, legal protection, convenience, and
branding into the price of the product.
Farm produce has no protection for intellectual property, patents, nor
copyright. Anyone can produce food. There is no room in the price for
innovation, brand protection, nor long term benefits as short term
competition is too strong.
5. Most businesses, with some artisans being a possible exception, run
on one primary imperative: profit. All decisions including the
establishment or closing of the business depends on the ability to
generate profit. Therefore, the option to exit the market exerts
influence on the supply-demand equation in that sector.
Farming is usually depending on a different primary motivator:
lifestyle - the desire to farm. Therefore, farmers are willing to make
so many sacrifices, like holding a second job, to continue farming.
The agri-food sector knows this and takes advantage of it and keeps
input costs high and commodity prices low.
6. Good business management includes a proper balance between fixed
costs and variable costs. As markets and prices vary, businesses can
expand or reduce their production by managing their variable costs.
Farms have very high fixed costs (land, machinery, buildings, breeding
animals) and very low variable costs, even close to zero on low-input
farms. Therefore their cash flow requirements are fixed. Farming is
the only sector that increases production when prices go down to
maintain cash flow, further exasperating the stress on supply and
demand.
7. Most businesses follow an accrual accounting system that measures
work in progress, inventory values at purchase cost and a unit cost of
production.
Most farms, having a low variable cost, use a cash accounting system
that does not neatly account for inventories, left over stock, nor
work in progress. Family labour is not accounted for in the cash
costs.
8. Businesses have a whole labour support program in place: company
pensions, CPP, employment insurance, workplace safety insurance.
Farmers are independent with few worker benefits. They cannot lay
themselves off and collect employment insurance benefits. Family
members do not have employee benefits. Their pension depends on the
value of the land and the quota.
9. Most businesses have some level of individual market power,
withholding and storing non-perishing goods, variable costs, mobile
labour pools, profit motivations, the threat of exiting the market,
and especially a relative balance in the number of players in
business-to-business transactions.
Individual farmers have negligible market influence. The imbalance in
their numbers removes their negotiating power. A few suppliers sell to
thousands of farmers who sell to a handful of buyers. Consolidation in
agri-business is only further squeezing farmers in the middle. Many
farmers themselves are price takers as they lack market influence,
must maintain their cash flow and live by a strong desire to farm.