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8 THE RURAL VOICE
Keith Roulston
Market has little room for being different
Keith
Roulston is
editor and
publisher of
The Rural
Voice. He
lives near
Blyth. ON.
By the time you're reading this
we may be on our way to the polls for
an expected spring election — or
maybe not, depending on whether the
latest Liberal Party polls show
insiders that Canadians' anger has
cooled over the sponsorship scandal.
Whenever the election is called,
the Reform/Alliance/Progressive
Conservative/Conservative Party will
be hoping for a breakthrough in rural
Ontario ridings. These ridings have
traditionally been a stronghold for the
Progressive Conservatives, turning to
Liberals only when voters were
disgusted with the Tories, such as at
the end of the Brian Mulroney era.
It's not much wonder, really that
parties that claim to be for
individualism win wide support in
rural areas. Most people who choose
to live in the country do so because
they want to be individuals. We don't
like having anyone living so close we
have to adjust our own way of life to
theirs so we generally have enough
land, even among non -farmers, that
we're the kings of our own
properties. When governments make
noises that they want to have some
say about what we do in our own
kingdoms, we usually get worked up
over it.
If rural people are generally
skeptical about the role of govern-
ment, they tend to have more faith in
the marketplace. Some people even
speak of the market as if it had a
personality of its own and its
attributes are seen as more depend-
able and respective of the individual.
That's where we rural people tend
to fool ourselves. The market often is
just as much about the tyranny of the
majority as is government. If you
want to see how much the market
respects the rights of the individual
against the majority, just talk to farm -
separated cream producers. All these
farmers wanted to do was to be able
to continue to farm in their own way
but the pressures of a modern market
shut down their industry. As their
number declined, the cost of serving
those left didn't warrant the cost of
serving them.
Oh I know there were also
concerns over quality of the cream
being picked up but let's face it, if the
cream producers had enough
importance in the market or in
politics, there would have been
efforts to help them solve the quality
issues. There are when other dairy
farmers have quality issues from time
to time. Instead OMAF, CFIA, Dairy
Farmers of Ontario and the processors
just shut off the marketing tap and
with it, went the option for these
individual-istic farmers to choose a
path other than that of the majority.
In fact the opportunity to be
different from the pack is fading fast
in rural areas. One of the driving
forces in agriculture is the realization
that, as there become fewer buyers,
even having access to a market is not
guaranteed anymore. That fact was
driven home by the hog crisis of 1998
when U.S. producers found they
couldn't find shackle space in
packing plants for their pigs. It made
being part of a company's preferred
buying pool through contracting seem
much more attractive.
The ultimate tyranny of the mark-
etplace is seen in parts of the U.S.
where contracts turn farmers into vir-
tual serfs. Such is the case of chicken -
producers who have no other buyer to
turn to if they lose a contract with a
packer so must do whatever the
company wants, for whatever price it
wants to pay. Given thechoice would
these producers choose the "freedom"
of a supposedly open market or the
"bureaucracy of' Canada's supply
managed poultry industry?
People who express faith in the
marketplace think there still is a
market, with many buyers and many
sellers. What we have today is a
limited number of buyers and that
means the market holds little hope for
the individual who doesn't want to
conform.0