Farm aid in the 21st Century: Less is more?

Canadian farmers are saying that the federal aid package of $500,000,000 a year for two years is not enough and that the federal government ‘just doesn’t get it’ - that the government simply does not appreciate the depth of the farmers’ despair.  That is probably true enough, after all, just how many in Ottawa have ever driven a combine for a living?

But the government has obviously calculated 500,000,000 dollars per year to be the politically self-serving optimum to build a facade of agrarian compassion, further grease the agri-conglomerates while taking this whole agricultural chapeau of bees off the federal head and placing it squarely on the heads of the provincial governments.

The government, however, would be better to give nothing at all; in this situation, less is more.

You see, no-one has yet asked the two billion dollar question, namely: "What is at the heart of all this recurring agricultural malaise?"  The answer, simply, is agricultural free trade.

The Western world has largely been sold on free trade through the claim that free trade will mean lower prices for consumers.  Of course, the necessary result of lower consumer prices is lower per-unit profit for farmers.  So what farmers do is produce even more units in an attempt to offset the falling prices.

They are only shooting themselves in the foot, however, as the resulting glut of produce on the market means yet lower prices still.  In countries around the world, the outcome of free trade in agricultural produce is having the same effect - farm bankruptcy.

So how, then, would the government be doing more by not giving aid to farmers? The logic is linked to the basic problem of agricultural free trade and the stranglehold agri-conglomerates have on the industry.

Cut aid and farmers would be forced to have a head-to-head with the providers of seed and the buyers of the yield (more often than not being one and the same company).  Farmer aid is ultimately subsidization of corporate food manufacturing.

Monstrous agri-conglomerates are the largest part of the farm crisis vis-a-vis their pro free trade lobbying and only stand to make that much more profit when governments throw aid money to farmers.  In the federal aid proposal offered last week, fully $20,000 per farmer is earmarked for purchasing seed .  This ‘aid’ money goes directly into the hands of but a few behemoth agro-businesses. From a federal government point of view, then, cutting farmer aid ultimately means cinching off ‘aid profits’ for those political lobby powerhouses that are the obscenely profitable agri-conglomerates - a politically unbehooving act.

Admittedly, the farmers do need a quick fix to survive.  But as Canadians we cannot stand idly by while the government continues to fan the flames of this free-trade fire consuming our agricultural heritage and our tax reserves all the while taking the easy and ineffective way out.

Before the government can take the difficult steps of cutting the aid, however, the national electorate must understand that the old line of global food shortages is all but a myth.  The true need for very expensive hybrid or genetically modified high-yield seeds is nothing close to what agri-business would have us believe.  That $20,000 per farmer going into the hands of the seed companies (and even more if you calculate other support chemicals) would more wisely be kept in the public coffers.

Price crises are only one malaise in the free-trade syndrome.  Throwing money to the farmers’ side does not even attempt to cure even this one malaise!  While few farmers will say they don’t need the money, most will agree that free trade and not low prices is the root problem and, unless free trade is eliminated, they stand to suffer all over again in two years when this round of aid runs out.

Furthermore, the consumers - we who were told of ‘all the savings from free trade’ in the grocery store - turn around and loose that savings to farmer aid paid out of our federal and provincial taxes.  Free trade, then, certainly doesn’t benefit you or me and it is only a disservice to farmers.

Canada, then, should start to ask itself "Just who, exactly, is gaining from agricultural free trade and farm aid?"