What is the Farm Crisis?

No noisy rallies here. No angry provincial premier to placate or avoid or all-party resolution from the legislature demanding federal help for farmers. Instead, Alberta offers the prospect of well-organized support for free-market agriculture from the taxpayer-funded commodity lobbies. It is the home of Reform MPs who, until a year ago, thought gun-control was the main farm issue and once opposed "subsidies". Reform legislators still fervently believe in the fantasy of an international trade deal that will solve the farm crisis without cost to Canadians.

So it was no coincidence that Vanclief chose Red Deer to announce an extension of the so-called farm-aid program. The Liberal chair of the Commons agriculture committee had labeled it an "absolute failure" even before farmers across the prairies repeatedly told him so in hearings in December.

But unlike Saskatchewan and Manitoba, the Alberta government has no serious problems with a program more designed to weed out farmers than help them. The Alberta government also stands alone in its support of the Kroeger recommendations for further deregulation of grain transportation that are now before the federal cabinet (see Ken Larsen, "Shipping News," The Post, fall 1999).

The only trouble with this picture is that Alberta farmers are failing to live up to the free-market stereotype and the free-market instincts of their politicians. Alberta farmers sounded an awful lot like their counterparts in Manitoba and Saskatchewan in their presentations to the Commons committee. They expressed their anger about government abandonment to the agriculture committee, and resisted the idea that the farm crisis was merely a short-term cash-flow problem to be solved with a one-time, politically-packaged bailout. Their situation is more desperate than that.

It is not too dramatic to say that the future of the historic, export grain-growing region of the prairies is in the balance. The region is fast becoming a Canadian outback. When you drive through it, on pavement that is patched, pot-holed, and sometimes given up to gravel, you are alone on the road - save for tandem grain trucks doing the work once done by railroads. The future many feared when the Crow freight-rate benefit was abandoned in the mid-1980s may already have arrived.

In the new outback, the farm crisis is about disintegrating rural communities. Rail lines are abandoned and grain elevators come down. Tax-bases shrink. Populations age and decline. Retail stores and government services like hospitals, schools and post offices are consolidated in larger centres. People who have given volunteer energy wear out or move away.

The farm crisis is also about the lack of leadership that can represent a fractured agricultural community. It is about coming to terms with the national political irrelevance of the prairie farm vote, and with urban-rural tensions ripe for political manipulation. Farm people once were romanticized as the backbone of the country; now they are perceived as parasites on the public purse and feel powerless to change that perception.

The farm crisis is about fears for the future of what is good work - work that feeds people, engages parents meaningfully with their children, and requires multiple skills. Now farm people talk about the prospect of becoming 'bio-serfs' under contract to one of a handful of seed-chemical conglomerates. They work great distances off the farm to subsidize their operations (in vulnerable rural professions like nursing), and face Revenue Canada reclassification as hobbyists for their trouble. They constitute perhaps the oldest occupational group in the country. Many of them are eating up what ought to be retirement equity, postponing what eventually will be a make-or-break period of generational transfer.

In that sense, too, the crisis is about the immense psychological burden of keeping a third or fourth-generation family farm that is not merely a business, but a physical anchor of home and identity.

Finally, the farm crisis is about an acute sense of government abandonment. The federal government, for example, is considering whether to yield the last traces of regulatory authority over grain transportation. The railroads have made it clear that grain is a commodity like any other, and not a high business priority at that. Farmers already pay several billion dollars more per year than they once did to ship their grain. They have seen few of the promised "productivity gains" from deregulation. "Remember the Crow" is becoming a rally cry - even in Alberta.

The same government has seemed all too willing to play free-trade "boy scout" with western grain when its competitors won't. Add to that Ottawa's virtual surrender of agricultural research to the private sector, and its enthusiastic support for the biotechnological revolution. This creates a situation where seed diversity is dangerously limited, and ambivalent farmers are caught in the crossfire of consumer boycotts and plant breeders' rights. They speak wistfully of the not-for-profit innovation that once came from federal experimental farms.

Make no mistake: there is an urgent need for a farm-cash infusion, even if the largest beneficiaries might well be creditors. At the same time, when politicians and urban voters hear what sounds like yet another demand for a bail-out, they should understand how much public money has been withdrawn from the farm economy. Whatever the perception, Ottawa's financial support for farmers has dropped steadily and substantially - as much as any funding envelope in this era of belt-tightening.

To the extent the crisis is about community, leadership, and the nature of work, the primary responsibility lies, of course, with farm people. But government policy can help or hinder them. These days, they can be forgiven their envy at the European Union's political commitment to farm populations, despite the trade difficulties it causes them.

Farm people, in the end, want meaningful policy recognition of the importance of family-based agriculture. At the very least, they and their communities deserve not to be written off as the sacrificial lambs of deficit reduction and trade liberalization.

Roger Epp is associate professor of Political Studies at Augustana University College, Camrose. A previous version of this story appeared in the Edmonton Journal.

Thousand Tonne (or Who Owns Your Soul Anyway?)

Lyrics by Ken Eshpeter

This song, to the tune of the classic working ballad, "Sixteen Ton," was the rousing, finger- snapping, hand-clapping conclusion to Ken Eshpeter's presentation to a panel on "Corporate Biotechnology, the Family Farm, and Food Security" at Parkland's November conference. The Cargill and Monsanto in the lyrics are transnational agri-business corporations; Agricore (formerly the Alberta and Manitoba wheat pools) and United Grain Growers are historic cooperatives in the process of corporate makeovers.

I was born one morning
when the sun did shine
My father said the farm
would one day be mine
"You'll grow wheat for your bread and oats for your meal,
But pangs of anxiety
you might feel."

 

Chorus:
You load a thousand tonne
and what do you get
Another year older
and deeper in debt
Oh Cargill don't you call me
cause I can't go
I owe my soul to Agricore

 

I'm on the phone
to UGG to confide
They'll sell me seed and fertilizer and herbicide
My crops are looking super
but my bank account is not
They say it's only accident
the price of wheat is shot

 

A farmer gets a rush
when he sees things grow
And "help" is there for buying from Monsanto
If you survive the hail and pests and lack of rain
Oh Cargill's waiting patiently
to "take" your grain

 

I'm standing here at 50 years
and wondering why
I've spent all this time looking up in the sky
I hope my children find a way
to break this chain
And bring some profit back
to raising grain

Ken Eshpeter farms near Daysland in east-central Alberta.