THIS MONTH, ONTARIO farmers of all stripes and sectors will be watching for the outcome of the Federal-Provincial-Territorial Agriculture Ministers meetings in Niagara-on-the-Lake.  The last time the Ministers were in Ontario last November, they announced there would be a review of federal business risk management (BRM) programs.

A growing number of Ontario commodities are facing the realities of declining reference margins, and we’re all concerned that the current suite of federal BRM programs isn’t working for farmers who need them most.

Ontario’s Agriculture Minister Leona Dombrowsky is the recognized “host” of the meetings, and farmers will be looking to her to lead productive discussions on BRM. 

Minister Dombrowsky’s government has shown leadership in Ontario by implementing the Risk Management Program (RMP) for grain and oilseed farmers, despite a lack of federal buy-in to date. The program has been a proven success, something farmers value and are willing to pay premiums for regardless of market prices that have improved gradually since the dismal days of 2006. Ontario’s pilot RMP runs out this summer, and producers will continue to press the provincial government to renew it to provide grain farmers with the stability they need to stay in business in an extremely volatile global marketplace.

RMP was created by farmers, for farmers, to make up for the inadequacies of federal business risk management programs. Other commodities are following suit, and working on their own program designs that will address the BRM needs of their producers not covered by federal programs. The federal government has made some tweaks to its BRM programming, but farmers across the country have all come to the same conclusion: federal BRM programs aren’t doing what they need to do to keep the family farm viable.

Farm organizations have tried to help.  We worked together in committees at the Canadian Federation of Agriculture (CFA) representing 200,000 farm families to propose a new federal program, AgriFlex.  We were relieved – briefly – when the federal government announced it would introduce an “Agricultural Flexibility” fund.  As farmers designed it, AgriFlex would be a federal funding envelope that would be distributed to provinces to help invest in regional programs, both in the BRM and non-BRM categories.  But the program the federal government announced fell short.

Federal Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz has excluded BRM from his Agricultural Flexibility program because he believes the current BRM suite is working just fine for Canadian farmers.  But prices for many commodities in Ontario are falling below the cost of production, and a growing number of commodities face declining reference margins as a result. Canadian farmers will be looking to the provincial agriculture ministers around the table, and its host, Minister Dombrowsky, to send a clear message to Ottawa that more must be done to protect the family farm.

Current programs are not working.  Farmers across the country are still waiting for the BRM review that was announced six months ago to prove it.  New programs like AgriFlex could fill the existing void, but they need adequate funding and true flexibility and must include BRM.