Supply management is worth a fight
Tom Blackwell, Andrew MacDougall and Christie Blatchford this week have all suggested the need to scrap or sacrifice supply management for our dairy, chicken and egg producers in the interest of signing a NAFTA agreement and reducing artificially high prices for milk, eggs and chicken.
Ironically I, as a Canadian consumer, find a litre of milk cheaper than a litre of Coke; breakfast with eggs cheaper than other meals I eat when in a restaurant, and chicken one of the cheaper meats to eat when I eat meat. How do you conclude that prices for these commodities are artificially high?
One cannot simply look at the cost comparisons with similar goods States-side. There are many dairy farmers who have thousands of cows on industrial farms (that, in the long term, are not environmentally sustainable) in places such as Arizona, California and Michigan, for example, who make a living on very small margins on large commodities and subsidies. These farms have farm workers who are paid substantially less than farm labourers here. Fuel is cheaper. Energy is cheaper. And with all of that, farmers in California, for example, are in big trouble right now with significantly increased water, feed and transportation costs (hay comes from Idaho and Montana) and low milk prices. They deal with this challenge by increasing production with lower margins, which only creates additional oversupply problems. These producers and the goods they produce are not good examples for comparison purposes.
I was on the farm as a young person when supply management was put in place. There were good reasons to put supply management in place. A significant reason was providing financial stability to farmers so they would continue to feed Canadians. It also meant increased financial stability for rural communities.
Supply management has its issues, and revisions need to be made. Quotas should not be marketable commodities that financially exclude entry of new farmers. We need to discourage large “industrial farming ” and continue the family-farm model that guided the introduction of the supply management system in the ’60s and ’70s. We need to be open to negotiation regarding “supply management” farm products with our trading partners. But any decisions regarding our supply management system should be based on sound reasoning and the common good rather than political bullying by our southern neighbour or political grandstanding by some of our Canadian politicians.
I, as a Canadian consumer (and non-farmer), am quite willing to live with the supply management system if it means a fair wage (without government subsidies) for producers, financial stability for those involved in the “food chain” and a comparatively reasonable price for goods produced.
Raymond Elgersma, Ottawa