The Rural Voice, 1985-09, Page 13packers, the processors, the
wholesalers, and the retailers may or
may not choose to increase their por-
tion of the pie as well. If they do that,
the consumer will notice an increase
in the price but they will not put the
blame where it belongs ... the farmer
ends up taking the rap for the high
food prices and he's getting the
smallest percentage of the dollar."
white paper on farm incomes) means
he isn't always received favourably by
audiences.
When discussing parity, Brinkman
wastes little time in dismissing the
U.S. parity price concept. Because
that formula used a 1910-1914 base
index, Brinkman says the formula is
based on outdated technologies
(namely horsepower), on very dif-
Cecil Bradley, OFA research manager: The pro-
blem with relying too much on the American
parity formula, is that the 1985 economy is "a
dramatically different beast" than it was in the
1940s.
While the optimist in Blake would
like to believe consumers can be
educated about farm gate prices and
low producer returns, realistically she
fears that all consumers care about is
"how much it is going to cost me in
the end." But she still thinks parity is
a viable solution to the current farm
crisis, and that by using the Farm
Products Marketing Act, the govern-
ment could implement fairer prices at
little additional cost. But once again,
Blake's philosophy, like many other
pro -parity arguments, includes supp-
ly management, an idea still unaccep-
table to much of the farm population.
The fact that there are so many
definitions of parity floating around
the farming community is the very
reason the Christian Farmers Federa-
tion of Ontario hasn't taken an of-
ficial position on the issue, says CCF
research and policy director Elbert
van Donkersgoed.
Some of the definitions are
realistic, he says, and sound very
much like Ontario's marketing board
programs for milk, eggs, and
chickens. But other definitions, he
notes, are like extreme variations of
stabilization. The research director
also finds that the economic relation-
ships of the past (such as the U.S
parity pricing formulas) don't always
fit today's economic realities. For
those reasons, the CCF's energies are
being extended on debt -reduction
strategies rather than on discussing
parity, says van Donkersgoed.
One man who has been discussing
parity a lot these days, often at infor-
mation meetings, is George
Brinkman, professor of agricultural
economics and extension education at
the University of Guelph. Brinkman's
message that parity may not provide
instant salvation for farmers (as well
as his past work on the notorious
ferent input costs, and on a very dif-
ferent productivity situation.
A second parity concept that the
professor debunks is the parity of in-
come philosophy which states that
farmers and non -farmers should earn
the same income for their labours.
That idea, Brinkman notes, is
misleading because it doesn't take in-
to account the very different sets of
investments of farmers and in-
dividuals in other professions.
The parity concept that Brinkman
finds most useful is the parity returns
philosophy. "The concept we're
looking at is what would the farmer
earn from all his resources if they
were taken and used in the non-farm
sector. In other words, for the
farmer's hours of work, hours of
management and capital investment
used in a similar kind of occupation
for comparable resources."
But admittedly coming up with a
formula to make this kind of com-
parison is extremely difficult.
Brinkman says one problem is that it
is very, very hard to get good, up-to-
date farm data to use as a base of
comparison.
Then there's another problem:
"The difficulty is that farming is dif-
ferent from other occupations in that
it has fixed assets like land and
buildings that people buy to get into
it. If you have a lot of people wanting
to get into it, they bid up the price of
those assets. So if farmers received
exactly the same return on their
labour and management and capital
as other occupations did ... they
would be receiving parity returns. But
in addition then, the farmer's land
goes up in value." Then the farmer
would be getting more than parity —
good for the farmer perhaps, but not
for other sectors of the economy.
"If you legislate parity and you
FARM TIRE
Specialists
We offer
Complete Mobile
Farm Service
We have a Targe
inventory of
• Radial Tractor Tires
• Rice Tires
• Regular Rear
Tractor Tires
• Complete line of
Front & Imported
tires in stock
Don't delay • Call today
HAUGH TIRE
AND MUFFLER SUPPLY LTD.
HWY. 4. South of Clinton OPEN Mon — Fri *30.,' 530 *
4e2.3752 w 462.9796 s.wrar 110 • ^•noon
Clo..a Paw, 32r
SEPTEMBER 19R5 11