Supply management benefits
I was delighted to read in the Penticton Western News the piece on this topic from the Cowichan Valley Citizen; all clearly stated and focusing on a few of the misconceptions many Canadians have about our supply management system.
I grew up with my father’s poultry businesses and before supply management so I know well what happens without such controls.
One additional plus that wasn’t mentioned is the fact that because our poultry farmers know they will get a decent — not an exorbitant one as some think — price for their products, they can afford to clean out and leave the barns empty for a short time after one flock has gone which greatly reduces the need for the use of antibiotics. This is not the case in the U.S. where the market forces incline farmers to replace a flock as soon as the previous one is removed, opening up the new chickens to diseases they don’t tend to get from their flock mates.
A letter in the paper today against supply management states that somehow if Canada dropped its supply management system, the U.S. and China would not dump their dairy, poultry, etc. products in our market, we’d pay less, and the moon would turn to cheese. Given the record of the U.S. in the past on such matters, never mind the current occupant of the White House, this is magical thinking. An example of this: when former tobacco farmers in SW Ontario started growing and marketing peanuts – obviously on a minuscule scale compared to the U.S. – the latter dropped the price on their peanuts so low that the Ontario farmers didn’t have a hope of competing even locally. Of course, one ‘problem’ for the American peanut growers was that the Ontario peanuts were superior in quality, for reasons I won’t go into here! I think the situation is similar with our supply managed products, and the result without them would be equally disastrous for our farmers.
And on the subject of how expensive our Canadian-produced food is — and I doubt this has changed much in the past couple of decades — on average Canadians put out something less than 15 per cent of their disposable income on food. If one takes away the so-called highly processed foods and buys the real stuff such as eggs, milk, poultry, etc. the number drops to about 10-12 per cent.
Let’s get a little perspective on the price of food for all but the very poor; instead, let’s focus on keeping Canadian farmers, and processors, in business and earning an income commensurate with the work involved.
Eva Durance
Penticton