COLUMN: Accent on Agriculture – Marketing boards controversial to some

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/09/2023 (758 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Eugene Whelan was a farmer and a politician from southern Ontario. He served as the Minister of Agriculture for a 12-year stretch from the early 1970s to the mid 1980s under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. It was under his watch that most of the national agricultural marketing boards were formed and started operating.

Mr. Whelan was dedicated to the well-being of farmers, especially Canadian farmers. He was of the opinion that farmers needed to be assured of a good income, which is why prices paid to farmers through the marketing agencies are negotiated, not set.

But other countries don’t follow the same philosophy. For most, farmers get paid what they are offered for the production. Sometimes, that is less than the cost of producing it. Farmers in other parts of the world look at our country and see the price that farmers receive, for milk to use one example, and want access to our market.

One of the features of the Canadian marketing board system is the control over production, imports and marketing. Each year the agency estimates the consumption, then sets the production to match the market. That way the market is never short, and the price never balloons and never tanks. And imports are not allowed in.

From a Canadian perspective, the difficulty arrives when Canada joins a trade group, such as NAFTA or CPTPP (the Trans Pacific Partnership). In these trade deals the U.S. (in NAFTA) and New Zealand (in CPTPP) filed protests against our country, claiming we were breaking the rules. Specifically, each charged that Canada was not allowing milk imports into the country. Canada lost both challenges. The most recent was the New Zealand action which sided with New Zealand. The panel decided that Canada was breaking the trade rules. But it did concede that our country did have a point that we do have some discretion over our imports. Canadian trade officials consider that point to be a win.

Eugene Whelan was controversial when he was the Minister of Agriculture (remember he considered Mikhail Gorbachev a personal friend). His support of marketing boards for farm products was not accepted by all farmers. And, globally, marketing boards never did catch on. Governments are very much in favour of helping farmers, sometimes even providing price supports.

The marketing board concept in Canada gives farmers and consumers, working together, the power to set the farm price as well as the retail price for milk, eggs and the other agricultural products included in the legislation. That ability to set the retail price is a lot of power to give to a group of farmers.

Jim Rae is the former host of Information Radio on CBC Radio.