The impending 25 per cent American tariff on all Canadian exports is playing havoc with farmers incomes and consumers' food security. Key sectors - beef, pork, grain and oilseeds – depend on US markets, while much of our fresh fruit and vegetables as well as processed food is imported. You may not know that our dairy, poultry, and eggs are safe from tariff threats because they are raised, processed and consumed within Canada, in the right amounts at the right time to ensure we always have enough without wasteful surpluses.
Supply Management provides dairy, poultry, and egg farmers with a level of economic stability that is the envy of farmers in the US, and beyond. South of the border, when the market price of milk plummets, the economic hardship frequently causes farming families to lose their farms. This type of devastating price fluctuation for milk doesn't happen in Canada. The reason: Supply Management.
As the name suggests, Supply Management imposes management upon the total supply of dairy, poultry and eggs produced in Canada, and ensures that our farmers produce no more, and no less, than the market needs. Managing supply helps prevent large swings in prices. It also eliminates massive overproduction and the resulting waste of good food that occurs in a number of other countries, including the US. Managing supply, sometimes referred to as production discipline, is one of three key pillars of Canada's Supply Management system.
The other two key pillars of Supply Management are cost-of-production pricing, and import controls. Cost-of-production pricing ensures that farmers receive a fair income for their efforts. Import controls provide for predictable and adequate supply by preventing foreign products from flooding our markets and putting our farmers out of business.
Under Canada's system Canadian consumers have the benefits of steady supply and steady prices. If a trade war happens, it will have minimal impact on our ability to buy milk, poultry and eggs, because we import and export very little of these foods. We produce domestically for a domestic market. Under supply management we have a certain level of food security with dairy, poultry and eggs that we don't necessarily enjoy with things like beef, pork and vegetables. With Supply Management farmers are at not at risk of losing their markets and having to sell the farm due to a trade war with the United States, because they do not produce for the US market.
Stable farm income under Supply Management has averted extreme farm consolidation and the mega-farm trend that has occurred with the US's get-big-or-get-out approach. Our smaller-scale farms mean that manure management is easier and the risk of environmental problems are lower. Also, more smaller-scale farms translates to more family farms on the landscape, with more people invested in being part of local communities.
Supply Management keeps the economic value of dairy, poultry and eggs within Canada. Greedy multinational corporations would love to break apart our system and extract this value for themselves. Under CETA, the CPTPP and now CUSMA, trade agreements have chipped away at Supply Management, and today 18% of Canada's valuable dairy market has been grabbed by multinationals. The result is our consumers’ food dollars flying out of our country. Preventing more erosion of Supply Management was the motivation for Bill C-282, which sought to remove Supply Management from future trade negotiations. Bill C-282 was supported overwhelmingly in the House of Commons, but died on the floor of the Senate when Parliament was prorogued in January.
Defending our food sovereignty, the ability to democratically control what we produce and what we eat, is worth all the knowledge and passion we can harness. Let's defend and then strengthen Supply Management.
-Matthew Wiens the Regional Coordinator for the National Farmers Union in Manitoba
