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6 THE RURAL VOICE
Keith Roulston
The impossibilitb of 'one voice'
Keith
Roulston is
editor and
publisher of
The Rural
Voice. He
lives near
Blyth, ON.
It's the time of the year for farm
meetings and somewhere along the
way some politician is going to tell
farmers to get their act together and
come to government with one voice.
Fat chance.
There are only two ways you can
have one organization represent all
farmers. On one hand you can take
such a bland stand that you don't
really represent anybody. On the
other hand you can have an all-
powerful organization that doesn't
have to listen to its members.
Except wheat producers in
western Canada have had that kind of
organization, and now some are so
dedicated to pulling it apart they went
to go to jail in protest. A growing
minority would undermine the single
desk sales system in favour of their
right to make deals on their own,
though of course they'd like the
Wheat Board to fall back on if they
can't find good deals.
Here in Ontario, the Federation of
Agriculture is upset that the voice of
agi iculture is going to get even more
fragmented if the National Farmers
Union retains its accreditation. But
the only way not to have splinter
groups is to be non -controversial. The
OFA has vocally supported genetic-
ally -engineered crops and animals,
envisioning a new age when farmers
will produce not just food, but
pharmaceuticals and industrial raw
materials and medical transplants.
How do you provide a voice for
organic farmers when you take such a
stand? Many supporters of NFU in
Ontario are organic farmers.
Recently OFA news releases
praising the provincial government
have sounded like their writers are
auditioning for copy writers for the
Progressive Conservative party in the
upcoming provincial election. The
organization's mindset that you get
more flies with honey I'm sure it has
disenchanted some of its own
members, particularly those who
might be supporters of the Liberals or
NDP who can see the words of their
own farm organization used against
them come election time.
The only place where there has
been "one voice" was in communist
dictatorships and we know darn well
there were many voices that would
like to have been heard but weren't
allowed to be. If you end up, by some
accident of politics, with one farm
organization, you'll have one voice
being heard but a whole lot of
unhappiness underneath, depending
on what direction the "voice" of the
organization tends to lean.
Take a look at Ontario Pork.
Large producers and packers felt they
were being stifled by a system that
was set up for the days when there
were many small producers. The
system was redesigned to
accommodate the wishes of the large
operators and now many smaller
producers aren't happy with a system
they see doesn't meet their needs.
While farmers bemoan the fact
they can't give one clear message to
government, they're no different than
any other part of society. I do not, for
instance, belong to the Canadian
Federation of Independent Business
because many of its policies over the
years went directly against what I
believe. Even the Liberal Party of
Canada, the most powerful political
organization in Canada, is currently
being rent by disagreements on
direction.
This drive for homogenization can
get carried away. It may be fine for
all our pigs to be the same size or all
our crops to meet equal standards, but
we need diversity of ideas and
opinions. We need ways for those
ideas to be expressed. We need the
ability of people who have a different
idea to be able to put that idea into
action, not be weighted down by a
monolithic system that insists there's
only one way for things to happen.
Democracy and free enterprise are
messy systems but they work because
of that very messiness.0