Media Clipping — May 5, 2001, The Halifax Herald

Down on the farm, before it’s gone

By Ralph Surette

NOTHING EVOKES the troublesome side of the new global order more than trends in agriculture. Farming is basic. Apart from being the source of the food supply, until a couple of generations ago it was the main underpinning of our then-rural social structure, and is still a necessary ingredient for any intact society.

The gradual disappearance of farming as we know it, replaced by huge conglomerates on the one hand and a few "niche" producers on the other, raises many troubling questions. Think, for example, of the Apple Blossom Festival in a decade or two as pure nostalgia for a dead industry.

The GPI Atlantic report on farm viability in Nova Scotia released last week put a sharp point on it. Alarms have been ringing about dying farms since the 1950s, but GPI’s elaborate "genuine progress" measurements for 1971-99 makes a compelling case that if nothing changes "the future of Nova Scotia agriculture is clearly at risk" - with apple and beef farmers, working way under the cost of production, at greatest risk.

Although total farm receipts have risen slightly in that time, net farm income - what the farmer keeps after expenses - has declined 46 per cent.

Farmers’ debt in relation to income has increased to an unsustainable 900 per cent, up from 300 per cent. And while incomes declined, government subsidies declined, too (including another hit in the last provincial budget in the form of reduced services and increased fees), but not as fast - meaning that dependency on the subsidies has grown.

The only stability and adequate income found in farming, says the report, are in the quota-managed sectors - poultry and dairy - and in some direct selling by organic farmers who cut out the middle man.

But quota management, which guarantees good prices and an income, is the nub of the issue. These farm marketing boards are themselves under assault, looked on by right-wing intellectuals as affronts to free enterprise and a devious way of gouging the consumer - never mind that food is dirt cheap and has declined some 35 per cent since the 1960s as a proportion of household expenses.

Marketing boards are like medicare - in never-never land as global and hemispheric free trade kick in harder, waiting for the trade challenge that will sink them. If global economics are completely unchained, chickens and eggs will likely end up being produced on megafarms in the southern U.S. where production is cheapest, milk on megafarms in Quebec or Ontario, pork and beef out West and so on (or apples in China - a main source of competition now for Valley juice apples) - in a dangerously tentative system dependent on chemical farming and cheap fuel for transporting the produce to distant markets. Meanwhile, the kink in this "free" trade and "free" enterprise is that the U.S., through subsidies and sheer market power, skews the system its way. Along with the European Community, they force everybody else to subsidize their agriculture in a system that is definitely not "free enterprise." And these subsidies, GPI affirms, are not subsidies to farmers - they are subsidies to everybody else, including the consumer, by keeping food prices artificially low.

For farming in Nova Scotia, increasingly reduced to a last stand in Kings County, these raw economics dictate that the farmer cash in by selling his or her land for real estate. This is happening now. It’s why we have to twin Highway 101 to handle all that commuter traffic from Kings County.

Meanwhile, in another angle on the same picture, everything related to food supply is being ferociously consolidated nationwide. Sobeys and Superstore own pretty well everything, and they want suppliers big enough to fill the shelves nationwide. That’s not us. Besides, GPI estimates Nova Scotians spend only 2.7 per cent of their food budget on Nova Scotia-produced food.

Recently, Nova Scotia farmers asked the provincial government for tax breaks in lieu of subsidies. That might help. But given the odds, much more is needed - starting with the need for government and society as a whole to take local agriculture seriously before it disappears, and stop suspecting that farmers are just looking for handouts.

Copyright © 2001 Ralph Surette