Agriculture in Alberta may be under attack, once again, and from its own governing party.
A new bill, tabled by a Progressive Conservative MLA apparently foresees permission being granted for contaminated seed to be used “throughout the province” in the near future whereas, currently, such seeds could only be used in areas already affected by it and only by permission to be granted by the minister.
The contamination in question is of fusarium head blight (FHB), also known as scab, a fungal disease of small grain cereals that has become of increasing international importance in recent years. FHB can affect wheat, barley, oats, rye, corn, triticale, canary seed and some forage grasses.
Many counties have already been ringing alarm bells about this legislation, which is still in the process of making its way through the committees and commissions of the provincial legislature and surprisingly enough, some provincial legislators could not even comment about it because they said they knew little about it.
It really baffles one as to why on earth a government would knowingly allow the contamination of soil in its own jurisdiction. Although there is no smoking gun at the moment, there is a lot of suspicion that this could just be another tailor-made legislation to cater to certain commercial interests, just like Bill 36, introduced by Ed Stelmach’s PC government a few years back in an effort to get the support (funding?) of the power industry trying to expand their operations in the province.
But the tragic aspect of it is that politicians could even think about jeopardizing the future of the most valuable asset of this province, and of this country, the agricultural land, just to please this or that interest group.
Canada’s farmers and agriculture have actually been under attack for quite some time. The Harper government’s dissolution of the Canadian Wheat Board’s marketing authority has been benefitting grain traders at the expense of farmers for some time now and this year’s bumper crop has just helped to make the situation so obvious to be seen by everyone.
The omnibus C-Bill 18 currently being discussed at the House of Commons in Ottawa is just the next step in bringing multinationals to the agriculture sector of Canada, a process which will likely transfer a lot more money from the pockets of farmers to the accounts of companies like Monsanto.
Developments in the global economy have left energy and agriculture as the most profitable sectors as earnings in both the manufacturing industry and the finance sector continue to shrink.
You may have heard that out of the $75 billion global investment in the automotive industry in 2013, Canada received “0” dollars while Mexico got somewhere close $6.5 billion. Let’s just remember that those automotive giants that took their investment dollars elsewhere last year received substantial support from the Harper government during the early stages of the financial crisis of 2008; so much for the sense of appreciation on the part of multinationals.
The same kind of shortsightedness seems to have come back to haunt us again, this time at the provincial level, in the form this legislative initiative.
It looks like the easy money coming from the oil and gas sector in the province has created a kind of “dipsomania”, so addictive that it has begun to cloud the vision of the people who are responsible for making strategic decisions for future generations who will inhabit these lands.
Unless farmers, the owners of the land, get organized and protect their interests, no one will do it for them.