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The Rural Voice, 1979-05, Page 19Perth all sitting on 5 to 10 times the land required. Waste, yes our greed, our waste, and our inability to learn anything from History will be our downfall. to get established on new farms of their own. — legislation to prevent take-overs of farm land by large corporations and foreigners. — establish upper limits on quota ownershiporcon trol. DAVID BR 1DSHAW LIBERAL CANDI!)ATE IN PERTH In 1978, 13% of ,i ' inadian's income was spent on home prepared food, compared to 22% in 1947. People are still complaining about rising prices. Compare Canada to other countries. In Britain 28%, Greece 36%, Germany 23%. Farming is most important to our economey as it represents 17% of our G.N.P 111910 a farmer fed himself and 10 others t -day he feeds Himself and 52 others. These are all impressive statistics, particularly good for putting you fast asleep. Speaking of sleep, governments at all levels must wake up before it, tco late. erosion of land. Lets take the map of Canada, with 2 colored crayons, one black, one red. Color in red all the agricultural land, and then color in black the land we are building factorys, houses, schools, cities on. Yes the black color's goes over the red. European planners in the 1860's realizied very quickley with the population explosion of the day, that farm land must be conserved if people were going to survive. European cities n...y seem crowd- ed, but there'sa reason. Land = Food = Survival. Canada is a perfect a a, irile of bad land use planning. Look at int ;ara Peninsula. Factories, housing, malls have replaced those once beautiful fruit farms. Closer to home, drive in Erie St., to Stratford. Beautiful new modern factories JOHN DAVIES, N.D.P. CANDIDATE IN PERTH The New Democratic Party is committed to do all within its power to keep our farms working and producing. Its goal for agriculture are maximum food production for Canada and a hungry world, and an effective marketing system to ensure fair and reasonable farm income. In 1968, 50c of every dollar earned by the farmer was used for production costs. Today it has risen to 67c. The incomes of farmers are expected to decline by 2% this year, while costs are expected to rise by at least 8%. Canadian farmers are falling farther and farther into debt. In its effort to bail out the farmer, the New Democratic Party would begin with the premise that the family farm is the basic unit of agriculture, and that food production should be for people first, not profit. It wants farm families to survive on the farm so that the rest of us may survive at the dinner table. As a candidate for election on May 22nd, I . am committeed to support orderly marketing and planned production to eliminate the bust and boom economy which has existed on the farm in the past. I would work to provide: — adequate loans for a variety of agricultural purposes, bu• particularly to enable young people to stay on the farm or BILL JARVIS PROGRESSIVE - CONSERVATIVE CANDIDATE 'PERTH Since the first of the year, I have had lengthy meetings with two producer groups in my county and a full day in session with the Executive of the Perth County Federation of Agriculutre. Firstly, I reject emphatically the Prime Minister's statement that Canadian farmers are "complainers". He has failed to distinguish the important difference between complaint and legitimate concern. At the useful and important meetings that I have had with my farm producers, I was briefed fully on a variety of legitimate concerns, particularly those which agri- culture regarded as ominous for the future. These ranged from farm land prices to financing, from cheese imports to the availability and cost of replacement parts, and from agricultural research to veterinary and laboratory services. The one common thread that I dis- covered was that inflation in Canada is the farmer's worst enemy. It has made our ' and •attractive to foreign investors; it has .caused input costs to sky -rocket; it has eroded the quantity and quality of agri- cultural services. No one group, except possibly pensioners on fixed incomes, are more affected or threatened by our THE RURAL VOICE/MAY 1979 PG. 17