Agriculture Marketing Boards aren’t Helping the World’s Hungry

People are malnourished and starving and yet countries like Canada still have supply management based marketing boards,an organization that holds a monopoly on the marketing of an agricultural commodity, such as dairy, poultry, eggs, etc.  Producers, i.e. farmers, are required to sell their product to the marketing board or must follow the rules imposed by the board.  In the case of supply managed boards the farmer must purchases quotas.  Any surplus production must be disposed of.  So in order to follow rules of a failed system put in place several decades ago, Canadian farmers are pouring milk down the drain.

I recently read an article published by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, it was written by Janyce McGregor and she feels that we cannot get rid of our marketing boards.  But she’s wrong.  First off, it’s believed that supply management create stable and predictable prices.  Canadians pay higher prices and there is very little competition in the market place.  All other business entrepreneurs are told to sink or swim and a farm is a business, so why do tax payers continue to support them.  Many feel it is too expensive to purchase back the quotas.  Australia did it with a simple tax to consumers and once the cost was paid, the tax was removed.  Simple changes turn into a huge effort because of a complicated multilevel legislation that involves our federal and provincial governments.  Don’t consumers have a say?  Canadians are continually told to make better food choices, but most of these are controlled by marketing boards, who continue to set the price out of reach for even Canada’s poor.  It’s hard to buy milk and bread, when pop and chips are cheaper.

Marketing boards were put in place to accomplish the following objective:  create conditions where farm families would make income that were comparable to the “average Canadian” family, to boost the farm’s income, to assist in stabilizing income on the farm, and to allow more farmers to keep the “family farm”.  A marketing board is not going to increase a family’s income to the level we are seeing in Canada.  Most spouses go out and work off the farm in order to increase the family income.  Only those boards that have supply management powers can affect the farm’s ability to increase its income, but it would all be dependent on quotas and circumstance.  If you have owned the quotas for generations or took out a loan to increase your quotas, interest rates are going to have a profound effect on the farm’s  income.  Only supply managed marketing boards are going to have stability in their market place, they are after all a legalized cartel.  And let’s face it farming is hard work, just like any other business and operations shut down whether there is a marketing board in place or not.  Farmers are closing up shop globally, not just here in Canada.

It’s time to give the consumer a voice.  Most of us want fairly priced Canadian grown commodities.  We want to make more healthy choices when we are filling the grocery store cart. Farmers should be treated right globally, we have no business subsidizing Canadian Farmers in order to keep global prices lower.  Market place competition is good and it’s fair to all consumers.     Case in point, a local store in the province of New Brunswick, advertised milk on sale in its weekly flyer.  The milk was from another province.  The milk was not allowed to be sold as advertised.  Governments across the country spend thousands in advertising, telling people to eat better and get fit.  But a Dairy marketing board prevents young moms from purchasing milk at “on sale” price.  Just as they force farmers to toss their excess milk down the sink.

Daily we can turn on the television and see starving children, with their distended bellies and bowed legs.  Yet marketing boards force producers to those excess commodities out to the trash.  Eggs and milk are easily turned into powder to be shipped to third world countries.  There are children in Canada that go to school without any food in their stomachs and there is no need of it.

The boards came about to try and solve problems, to get the production to meet the demand for farm goods.  I’m not blind I can see the demand is greater than the supply, but only if you pay for it.