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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 1987-01-28, Page 5THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 28, 1987. PAGE 5. Lincoln, where are you when we need you? BY BRUCE WHITMORE In the December 30 Ontario Farmer, Koleen Garland writes that “agriculture appears to me to be more and more like a sailing shin on a stormy sea. Every hand is on deck looking for the storm to break but no one has the brains enough to take the helm and steer her out. Agriculture needs a good captain with a good compass.’’ During this six-year agriculture crisis there have been enough platitudes from politicans and Forum FORUM is a feature of The Citizen which attempts to bring different points of view from area residents to the fore. It is designed to stimulate discussion. FORUM will appear once a month in The Citizen. If you have a topic you would like to contribute 1,000 to 1,500 words about, please contact the editor. Letters to the editor in reply to the ideas expressed in Forum are also welcomed. enough expertise from bureau­ crats and academics to fertilize a big corn field. Why is it that the farmers who get dirt on their hands and manure on their boots continue to let their destiny be controlled from outside their industry? A farmer feeds 90 people but his farm won’t feed him. Don’t people realize that our soil is the force which makes the good life possible, providing every morsel of food they eat, all the clothes they wear and every dollar they have in their pocket? Sinceevery farm dollar becomes a dollar of factory labour why do they want to lower the price of food? Isn’t $4 corn times a multiplier of seven equal to $28 to the National Income while $2 corn only generates $14 of income to the industrial and service sectors? The slack has to be made up by running up the deficit on printing more money into circulation. In this information and service age, government sure tries hard to discredit the truism, “so goes agriculture, so goes the econo­ my.” Theeconomy hastobe ableto consume its own production, as Henry Ford recognized in 1913 when he gave his workers a handsome raise so they could afford to buy the Model T’s which they mass produced on his new assembly line. Similarly, doesn’t corn have to be able to buy the combine? Government grants to build com­ bines did not convince many urbanites to put a combine in their driveway! Prices are policy-driven because government policy allows import invasion. Doesn’t each pound of imported beef create eight pounds of‘surplus’ grain and displace a domestic job? If the minimum wage can be legislated in spiteof surplus unemployed la­ bour, why can’t the price of a bushel of corn be legislated to equal the minimum wage? Is it coincidence that in the same 40 years that it took the USA to become the largest debtor in the world, Japan has become the world’s largest creditor? The Japan of 1945 was devastated by war, but in 1986 surpassed USA in per capita income at $17,000 to $16,000 in US dollars. This was accomplished with a population of 115 million on an area the size of Montana and a prime rate at only three percent. Toyota is the world’s largest auto company and eight of the world’s 10 largest banks are Japanese. Still there is quality of life with an illliteracy rate of only one percent, the seventh lowest infant mortality rate in the world, a male life expectancy over 73 years and fewer gunshot deaths in a year than occur in U.S.A, in a day. Could all of this success be because Japanese policy does not allow the multinationals to search out cheap foreign goods which would undermine her own produc­ ers? They price Canadian wheat at $900 tonne to their grain trade and enjoy the multiplier effect at that price without underpricing their own farmers’ cost of production. Theirfarmers are regarded as a scarce natural resource -- not disposessed as in North America. It’s no surprise that ‘made in Japan’ is a technological wonder rather than a bad joke. We’ve had the “Year of Youth”, the “Year of Peace” and now the “Year of the Homeless”. Never- the-less we still have youth unemployment, wars in progress throughout the world, and thou- sandsof homeless (even people goingtofoodbanks in Canada). How can we expect peace in South Africa or Nicaragua when the people are hungry? Wouldn't you fight if your kids were hungry? They can hardly ‘demand’ our surplus food when we steal their cheap labour and their natural resources. Similarly, how can we expect to employ our youth and house the unemployed when the raw materials in this country are priced too low to buy the production of the industrial sector? Have you ever wondered why our 200 Canadian food banks have evolved since 1980 in tandem with our apparent ‘surplus’ of food? Some of us should wonder about the morality of surplus food when 18 million people die every year from starvation. Meanwhile government ex­ pands its role to cover up the inequities to those shared out of the Keeping the natives from being too restless... economy. To keep the natives from getting too restless for comfort, subsidies, grants and welfare pace the rate of bankruptcy while inflation masks the declining rate of profit. Unsound debt expansion creates the semblance of a healthy economy. To make matters worse this absurd process creates a blizzard of regulations and forms Besides being ridiculous, it isn’t working. The deficit grows, farmers are dispossessed, food lines lengthen and excess office and plant capa­ city abounds. Still, however, the unspoken slogan of every techno­ crat and politician is self-perpetu­ ation via band-aid solutions. If we live and die by the soil, then city existence is the result of rural success. Properly-priced food is in everybody’s interest as a guaran­ tee of good land stewardship. Where is the margin for error in Ontario, with apopulation of nine million and nine million acres of farm land when it takes an acre to sustain each one of us? You’d think that the loss of two or three tonnes of top soil and the urbanization of 26 acres per hour would some how be alarming. The multinationals will import from a hungry Third World no doubt. Why do.the bureaucrats have such a razor-thin commitment to agriculture? Have they notread history? Wasn’tit the Romans who had an army of bureaucrats, burdens of taxation, inflation, money debasement, tax loopholes for the rich, growing poverty, decline of production, soil exhaus­ tion, disease epidemics, expensive wars, a welfare way of life, family breakdown, and yes, dispossessed farmers who fled to the city? No politician will admit there might be a crisis. It’s easier to march on unconcerned, with a child-like interest in the hedonistic pursuit of pleasure and a higher standard of living. It will take real courage to captain the ship. The stripe of the political party could matter less. But don’t hold your breath for political solutions. Look well to yourself for survival unlessyou still have faith in those who give you Dreamstreet, those who told you “to plant fence to fence”, and tell youthereis a surplus; or those who provide rent controls to address a housing shortage. If we don’t holler and scream when we think they’re doing it wrong, if we just mind our own business and go on trying to make a living, we get just what we deserve. There were once politicians of vision and courage. Take Abe Lincoln who wanted to build a railroad. He said if we buy the The way I see it The good BYTOBY RAINEY There ’ s a lot to be said for a good blizzard. It defines who we are as Canadians, and gives us a certain pride of place, as though we were allentitledtowear a button that says “I survived the blizzard of ‘86.” Americans seem to die like flies every time nature turns nasty, but when was the last time you heard of a Canadian perishing in a storm through his own stupidity? We are a people of a northern land; we’re tough and resilient - we’re Canadians, and proud of it. A good blizzard also re-affirms our place in the universe, and keeps us humble. Life goes on much the same as usual if we can’t make it in to work for a day or two; no one is indispensible to the ordered running of the universe, a good point for early heart attack candidates and workaholics to keep in mind. A good blizzard brings out the BRUCE WHITMORE is a Winthrop-area fanner. rails from England, we’ll have the rails and they’ll have the money. If we build the rails we’ll have the rails and the money. Lincoln understood fair trade not only between countries but also be­ tween city and farm. Mr. Lincoln, where are you now when we need you? Unless this political vacuum in agricultural leadership is filled by a Lincoln, farmers will continue to produce themselves into obli­ vion. United we stand, divided we fall. Write a letter, speak out, become political. of blizzards best in people. Not only does a challenge from nature provide the opportunity for neighbour to help out neighbour and stranger to shoutjoyfully tostranger, but it brings harried families closer together by virtue of the fact that they can’t go anywhere else. It is a known fact that more cookies are baked, more popcorn popped, more Monopoly played, more jig-saw puzzles completed and more “remember when’s...” re­ called in a family during the course of a paralyzing blizzard than at any other time of year. And finally, in a community of farmers, there is nothing quite so satisfying to the soul (after the water is thawed out and the silage pick-axed loose)as a barnful of warm and contented livestock, safe in our own keeping, munching on the fragrant reminder of a bounti­ ful harvest past, and of smiling, sunny days of summer past, and summer yet to come. The International Scene The crunch in farming: the US version BY RAYMOND CANON A great deal has been written about the problems being encoun­ tered by Canadian farmers and there are without a doubt a number of serious ones, not the least of which is foreign competition from both the United States and the European Common Market. It needs to be pointed out, however, that agriculture is going through a state of crisis not only here but in the other two areas as well. Theresultisthatfarmers, not having a great deal of clout on their own, are looking to their govern­ ments to support them and this is what is being done, not only here but elsewhere. Perhaps, since we share acommonborderwith the U. S., it would be propitious to look at their side of the story. Whenever I think of the Ameri­ cans and their farm problems, I am reminded of the Indian who proclaimed that white men always spoke with a forked tongue. For me that is precisely the case in the United States. Washington makes a great display of its loyalty to such things as frpe trade and then promptly turns around and pro­ ceeds to lavish all kinds of protectionist measures on its farm community. Small wonder that other countries such as Canada are finding it increasingly difficult to put up with this dichotomy; the first step in a war of retaliation has already been taken by the Cana­ dian government with its counter­ vailing duty on American corn imports. Caught in the middle are the American farmers who are cur­ rently undergoing what can be described as a traumatic period of readjustment. Adecadeagothe same farmers thought they were sitting on top of the world. Prices were high, the value of their land was going up and many of them took advantage of the situation to invest in additional machinery as well as buy more land. In addition the generally favourable outlook caused a great many people to take upfarming as a profession. The results were predictable! There were far more farmers than the industry could support if the bottom fell out of the market. Fall out it did! Today there are any number of ghost towns to bear witness to the fall. The decline has notyetcometorest; economists predict that another 15-20 per cent of the farmers still in business will go under before the crisis comes to an end. What is disturbing is not the fact that many of the newcomers were the first to go; at the present time it is the relatively efficient and long-time farmers that are being forced to give up the fight. They are doing so because they have done everything possible to reduce overhead and still they see no light at the end of the agriculture tunnel. In this they are right. There really is not much down the line to cheer them up. In short just about everybody is hanging in and hoping that somewhere in the near future times will change. In the meantime they are yelling to Washington for help. The farm land that has been abandoned has not been surpri­ singly taken over by the creditors. Some of it has been left as is, some has been sold to those still optimistic that the situation has or will soon bottom out and will get better in the 1990’s. Still other, or about 60 million acres of it, has been sold to farm management companies which are not much inclined to look after the needs and wishes of the average farm com­ munity. They are in it for a profit and they go about that job the best way they can. This means that the Americans are looking at a brand new phenomenon - that of leasing. You may have been a farmer once, you may even have owned your own land but lost it or even sold it at a loss. If you want to continue farming, the only thing you can realistically do in the short term is to lease land back from the farm management company. The irony on the entire situation is that it could well be the land that you once owned. In the meantime the American government, to show that it has not ignored the farmers, is showering them with a multi-billion dollar support program which does little but make a bad situation worse. In addition, Washington is going after, for one reason or another, all the chief competitors of their farm industry whichareCanada, Au­ stralia, the European Common Market. Preach free trade for everybody else and practise pro­ tectionism at home seems to be the watchword these days in Washing­ ton. Meanwhile the European Common Market is having pro­ blems of its own but that is another story.