It’s been a while since I bagged on farm subsidies. Let’s get back to that.
One of the classic — one is even inclined to say timeless and enduring — features of Canadian agriculture is the government-awarded monolith For Your Own Good. In the prairies, this most often manifests itself as the Canadian Wheat Board. Wikipedia explains:
The purpose of the Wheat Board, which was made compulsory in 1943 by the government of Canada via the War Measures Act, was to control all grain prices.
Basically, farmers sell wheat and barley to the Wheat Board at what are termed “controlled” prices. The Wheat Board turns around and sells that produce on the world market. The Wikipedia article elaborates:
From the standpoint of supporters of the board and labour unions, the board gives individual farmers increased marketing power in a world market which gets them a higher price than they would otherwise get, not only through the efficiencies of scale, but as well by exercising oligopolistic marketing power on the selling side, especially for Durum wheat.
So the theory is that the CWB is good for Canadian wheat farmers because it makes wheat too expensive. Canadians: next time you see melodramatic television footage of starving people who can’t afford a loaf of bread, thank your Member of Parliament. But don’t worry; it’s all for the best, you see:
Supporters of the board’s monopsony fear that an end to would put farmers in a situation like that in the early part of the 20th century where farmers effectively competed with each other to sell their grain, a situation that effectively put them at the mercy of big agribusiness and the railroad monopolies and reduced farm incomes.
I’ve… noticed that the farmers who lost their land during the “early part of the 20th century” — and their families — never recovered, contributing to the greater than 70% unemployment rate on this continent. If only those people had been able to take up other trades better aligned with the changing times, like manufacturing. Why, we might have grown a giant domestic… um, this is just a flight of fancy, but maybe an automobile industry somewhere around the ’40s and ’50s, with plenty of jobs for those skilled, intelligent, hard-working ex-farmers. But that contradicts the obvious facts that wealth never increases and that, once established in a vocation, people can never acquire new skills.
If that sarcasm rubs you the wrong way, ask yourself how you’re reading this blog post.
Of course, we’re assuming that unsubsidized farmers without benefit of government-established monopsonies immediately find themselves, um, scythed down and gathered up by those awful big agribusinesses. Only… the Canadian Wheat Board started out by buying — at literal gunpoint — and reselling almost all crops, and is now reduced to non-feed grain and barley. What about those other farmers?
The counter-argument is that producers of non-Board crops such as canola do not seem to have this problem.
Hmm.
Well, regardless. I mean, what’s the harm? If the Canadian Wheat Board does work, then Canadian farmers get much better prices than they otherwise would, and if it doesn’t work then they’re still competitive with unsubsidized farmers, right? Okay, fine, so some foreigners — not that there’s anything wrong with being a foreigner – spend more on staple foods than they otherwise would, but they don’t vote for Canadian politicians. We gotta look out for our own, right?
The problem is, this assumes that there’s a single market for crops. And, well… there ain’t.
- Canadian agriculture is completely screwed up, volume XVII (Offsetting Behaviour)
In Manitoba, it is illegal to sell potatoes from your small garden plot at farmers’ markets. Because the selling of potatoes is a monopoly awarded to Peak of the Market. And Peak of the Market will fine you $10,000 if you try it.
Now, farmers’ markets are often a bit pricier than yer standard Wal*Mart food section. They cater to people who really want to get high-quality fresh produce, or at least pad their environmentalist egos by buying locally-produced organic produce*, and are willing to pay higher prices to get it. So while Peak of the Market might be able to get Manitoba’s potato farmers artificially-inflated prices on the world potato exchange (if such a thing there be), they’re likely to get far lower prices than the farmers themselves would obtain at a… farmers’ market.
But farmers who sell a portion of their crops at farmers’ markets are cutting into Peak of the Market’s profits. And Peak of the Market, because it has the guns of the government behind it, can fuck you up if you try to go around them. It’s sort of like the Mafia, only not illegal. Here’s the scoop:
Peak of the Market legally controls potato production in Manitoba. Until this year, farmers who did not grow potatoes for Peak of the Market were allowed to grow 4 acres of potatoes to sell on their own. This year Peak of the Market changed the rules as of July 15th. Now farmers are not allowed to grow potatoes to sell unless they have a Peak of the Market quota and sell only to Peak of the Market.
But don’t worry: Peak of the Market is going to figure out how to take a cut — I mean, how to facilitate the sale of potatoes to smaller markets — real soon now.
- Manitoba potato monopoly (Offsetting Behaviour)
But Peak of the Market is planning to come up with new regulations next year to formalize the way small producers sell to farmers’ markets, whose popularity is increasing as more consumers seek out local produce and desire knowledge about the origins of their food.
“Technically, they’re covered under the regulations. Historically we haven’t worried about farmers’ markets because it’s a small acreage,” [PotM president Larry] McIntosh said. “I can’t speculate until I meet with my board, but we’re not going to do anything to put out the local producer. We want to do what’s best for the industry as a whole.”
Uh huh. The same guys who fine “the local producer” $10,000 for not selling product through the local capo are “not going to do anything to put out the local producer”.
The incentive you’ve been patiently waiting for me to point out is this: Peak of the Market — or the CWB, for that matter — has no incentive to do well by its customers. The defining characteristic of these farm boards is that they’re monopsonies — they get to set a price, and by government coercion their sellers must deal exclusively with them. They’re under no incentive to give a fuck about the farmers they claim to champion.
While I’m linking to Offsetting Behaviour on the subject of Manitoba’s farm labour politics, here’s some good news for a change:
- And a victory for the little guy against the union (Offsetting Behaviour)
Three years ago, migrant farm workers at Mayfair Farms in Portage, Manitoba, Canada were deceived into joining a union. One of the workers got in trouble with the police for a non-work related problem. The United Food and Commercial Workers Union told the Mexican workers, most of whom did not speak English well let alone read it, that signing cards would get the UFCW to provide legal help for their buddy. They didn’t know that signing the cards meant that they’d joined a union. They didn’t want a union. Nothing required the union to provide documentation in a language that the workers could understand. The sordid tale is documented here, here, and here.
Now, the farm workers have finally been able to decertify the union.
Outstanding. I’m not particularly opposed to unions in general, but the best experiences I’ve had with unions I’ve been a part of have been defederating from two of them.
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* Some of which, incidentally, is growing under the railing on my balcony. I bet it’s high in fibre.
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