The Rural Voice, 1978-02, Page 3COMPLETE
PROTECTION
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356-2582
Let's change
the terminology
A consumer advocate in January told a meeting in Hanover
that consumers distrust marketing boards, that the reason for
producing is consumption. A professor told the national food
policy conference in Winnipeg that a major weakness of the new
competition act is that farm marketing boards are exempt and
that marketing boards have misused their monopolistic powers
(see these stories in this issue).
The farm marketing board has become the easy target for
people upset with the rising cost of food. There seems to be little
logic used in most of the arguments against the boards and a
good deal of ill-informed emotionalism. Farmers try to fight back
with logic but their arguments usually get lost in the shuffle.
Part of the problem could be that farmers are using out of date
and unpopular terminology. A farmer is many things in this
complicated world but most of all he has had to become
businessman. He has begun to use the businessm
terminology: phrases like return on investment, and profile
Yet this switch comes at a time when the business world
never been so unpopular with the liberal thinking public
media. Despite concern over strikes, the plight of the worker is
still much more sympathetically received by the public (most of
whom, remember, work for someone else) than the plight of the
businessman, be he the small independent variety or the tycoon.
When farmers fight consumer complaints with the argument
that all they want to do is earn a decent profit, they use the word
that triggers all kinds of bad images with the consumer. Like it or
not. profit is a dirty word today. How much more effective might
farmers be, one wonders, if they used the term "earn a decent
living" or "earn a decent wage" instead, terms which are
readily accepted by most people who themselves are voicing the
same complaints (even when they earn several times what the
farmer earns).
To the farmer, of course, profit and earning a living are the
same thing, but the slight twist in terminology can make a quite
different impression. If consumers thought of marketing boards
in comparison to labour unions to which many of them belong,
instead of as cartels like the mid -east oil cartel, the job of
• explaining the farmer's position might become easier.
the rural
Voice
Keith and Jill Roulston, Co -Publishers.
Published monthly by Squire Publishing House,
RR 3, Blyth, Ont. NOM 1H0.
Telephone 523.9636.
Subscription Rates: Canada, S2.00; Outside Canada, $3.00;
Single copy, 25 cents.
Editor: Keith Roulston.
Authorized as second class mail by Canada Post Office.
Registration number 3560.
THE RURAL VOICE/FEBRUARY 1978, PG. 3.