The Rural Voice, 1989-07, Page 23solve local problems and to regulate
environmental controls.
The municipalities are becoming
more aware of the fact that they
need to set up development
organizations...
Yes. But every little community,
they have all got their parks set out
waiting for industries to flock in, and
that hasn't happened. And it doesn't
work that way. And that's why this
pluriactivity study is revealing all sorts
of different ways in which people
actually generate jobs.
They're not jobs that come out
necessarily in little factories on those
little industrial estates. There's some-
thing like 40 per cent of the industrial
estate capacity in rural areas of Ontar-
io unoccupied, and they've been there
for 10 years waiting for some little
factory to come out and settle down
there. So that model is not on.
But what we've found is strength
in these other models where it's sort
of haphazard and random and more
"entrepreneurial" ... if you're going
to tell farm people that they can't
build a little place on their farm or
can't do this on their farm or can't do
that on their farm, after a while they
will say "Well, what the heck," and
their kids say "What the heck" and
they're going to go to London or
they're going to go to Toronto. We
need to help farm and rural people use
their skills, ideas, and capital to gen-
erate businesses as well as farming.
8. Some studies of "rural restruc-
turing" make what some farmers
might consider to be dangerous or
undesirable assumptions. Would
you respond with your views about
the following assumptions:
a) that part-time farming is an
increasing, permanent, and wide-
spread phenomenon;
Part-time farming is increasing.
I believe it is permanent. We're con-
vinced in the research group that I'm
working with in western Europe, and
several people in Canada now are fair-
ly sure, that the model of pluriactivity
is a much more natural, familial
model of development than the so-
called specialized full-time farm,
which is purely based on business
principles and therefore is totally
vulnerable to the marketplace.
We've seen that the market in ag-
riculture is both volatile and insecure
as far as the future is concerned, and
that any family worth its salt therefore
is going to have to take out its own
insurance by enabling its members to
participate in labour markets and earn
income, and do the sorts of things
which make a satisfactory lifestyle.
Pluriactivity is a much more soci-
ally as well as economically satisfying
lifestyle for rural families as well as
for urban families. So for those rea-
sons we believe that part-time farm-
ing, pluriactivity, multiple job holding
— whichever term you want to use —
will become much more permanent
and widespread during the latter part
of the twentieth century.
Let's be clear: I'm speaking of
farm families. Males heads of house-
holds may still be "the farmer," as
long as other family members can
earn income other ways.
b) that price supports for
farmers are not fiscally possible;
The level of support for farm
people delivered to them through the
price support system, the compensa-
tory systems, in the long run will not
be, in my view, politically as well as
financially possible.
The level of support is enormous
per capita, and there is always the
prospect that the cherished view of
farmers held by society will run out,
will deteriorate ... if there is a •
common understanding of how much
society is paying to sustain the farm
community through price supports.
A greater proportion of the
subsidies to farmers, in our view,
should be developed and spent on
supporting the infrastructure and
developmental possibilities in rural
communities such that other jobs will
be created so that farmers can remain
where they are and do farming but
also have other income -generating
possibilities. The govemment should
spend money on creating these non-
farm opportunities as well as directly
supporting farmers through subsidy of
commodities.
. How long can we go on
spending $6 billion? We're all right
for a while because Mazankowski is
deputy leader and he's also Minister
of Agriculture, but as soon as you get
a wimp in there who can't defend
himself in the cabinet, people are
going to point out to him how much
money is going down the agricultural
tube compared to how much money is
going into other sectors. It's just not
comparable. Not when there are only
135,000 farmers in Western Canada
who are getting $4.8 billion. And then
it turns out, if you really analyze it,
that out of that 135,000 farmers,
25,000 are getting the lion's share, and
they're already well off. That's what
the Europeans have discovered, that
much of this subsidy goes into the
pockets of people who are doing all
right.
c) that in the name of "economic
efficiency" there will be a bigger
gap between, on the one side, large
corporate farms producing most of
our food (and perhaps controlling
its processing as well) and, on the
other side, part-time farms either
serving niche markets or operating
in something of a ghetto (farming
subsidized by off -farm work, for
example);
There is a growing gap, without
any doubt at all, between those who
produce the nation's food and those
who are farming but who contribute
an ever decreasing proportion of the
value of production in agricultural
terms.
For example, we're fairly sure that
somewhere in the order of 9 per cent
of Canadian farms produce just about
40 per cent of the total farm sales, and
that's a considerable disbalance. And
it's quite clear that, in an environment
or in a period of time in which there is
a surplus of food commodities, both
within Canada and in the Western
industrialized nations and then even
globally at this point in time, then the
JULY 1989 21