It has been more than three weeks since the federal ministers of transport and agriculture announced measures to move the bumper crop from prairies to the ports and last week the federal government turned that measure into legislation so that if another bumper crop comes our way in the future, farmers will not be affected negatively from the abundance of their yield.
One cannot know whether those announcing these steps are really aware of the real situation on the ground: Tonnes and tonnes of grain are still waiting to be loaded onto the cars while the farmers who produced that bumper crop are getting squeezed due to lack of cash flow as the new seeding season approaches fast.
Estimates on the loss of the grain farmers due to the transportation bottleneck vary between $7 billion and $20 billion. While it is certainly a very important factor, the size of the loss incurred by the farmers due to the lack of transportation is dwarfed by the alarming reflections in the current picture from the standpoint of the future of agriculture in Canada and the dimensions of the harm brought about by the policies of the Harper government, policies driven by ideology rather than rationality.
Personally, I think the greatest blow ever dealt to Canadian farming by the Harper government was the dismantling of the single desk marketing of the Canadian Wheat Board.
It is no secret that many of the area farmers saw CWB as an organization limiting their freedom in selling their crop. But CWB was much more than a marketing organization only, it was the protector of the quality of Canadian grains, in particular Canadian wheat and it was the address that importers of grain from other countries went to buy Canadian grain.
Just one example is that following the dismantling of the Canadian Wheat Board, for the first time in decades, Japan has stopped importing wheat grown by our farmers and went to US to buy its supplies.
Now, as you may have heard through national media, the current CWB, with its clipped wings and castrated organizational base, is now trying to build its first grain elevator in Manitoba.
The question is whether this move constitutes a major effort on the part of the farmers to revive the organization in a way that will help their community to protect their interests, or this will be just another trick to create infrastructure through which grain traders will be able to make still more profit at the expense of prairie farmers.
Given that the current CWB administration refused even to comment about the current bottlenecks in grain transportation when asked for their opinion on the current backlog, it is highly unlikely that they will make any move to resist the policies of the federal government. On the other hand, the current administration could turn the organizational basis of the CWB to a profit-oriented grain trading entity, which, in turn, might end up being bought by a multinational in another blow to Canadian farmers.
The Conservative Party government seems obsessed by their determination to serve the interests of corporations at the expense of the small businesses and working population of this country.
And Mr. Harper clearly is not concerned about Canada’s rankings as one of the worst polluters of the environment thanks to his determination to cater to the needs of big oil companies.
The report that has just been released by the UN on the real and growing impact of the climate change is going to impact the agriculture sector most as it depends on the atmospheric conditions for sustainability.
With the profit concerns taking over the sustainability worries at the hand of the current federal government all through the economy, even Alberta, one of the most fertile regions of the world to grow food, may find itself unable to realize that potential within a generation or two.