Farmers are pissed off.
And that’s not good for the food we buy or the future of our agricultural system.
If you’ve been paying attention to the news recently, you may have noticed that farmers are hopping mad.
They are showing their ire in a number of innovative ways designed to focus attention on their plight.
Tractors blocking roads is one tactic.
Dumping items on a road (in this case, tires) to disrupt traffic is another tactic.
Or, putting together a long parade of tractors, and going on a promenade down a major highway to disrupt and slow traffic is yet another.
The mainstream media coverage of this has been spotty, or ephemeral. The protests are much more present in France than they are in Canada. So far, I have only seen farmers in Quebec resorting to these kinds of tactics. I assume that farmers across the rest of Canada are feeling the same pain as those in Quebec, but the urge to protest isn’t as strong. Or, because it’s spring, they’re busy planting and don’t have time for extra-curricular activities.
For those of you who have seen these demonstrations, you might wonder at the ‘why’. Why do farmers feel compelled to leave their farms and burn large amounts of fuel they can’t really afford to waste on a protest?
The answer is indifference.
As I’ve written about in this space a few times already, farmers are taken for granted or just plainly ignored.
Politicians in particular never talk about farmers, let alone talk to farmers. Farmers, and agriculture, is low on the political priority list, if it even makes the list at all. In Canada at the Federal level, farming is looked at through the lens of the environment, where more regulatory conditions are imposed on farming (which come with increased costs for the farmers) in order to tamp down national greenhouse gas emissions.
Consumers rarely think of farmers, as the connection between them is essentially broken. When you get your food from a grocery store, there’s not a lot of evidence of farms or where your already cut, packaged or processed food comes from. Let alone that much of the ultra-processed food in the store isn’t really food at all and came from a spotless football field-sized factory rather than a farm.
Farmers themselves, under normal circumstances, are just too damn busy to take time out to raise their profiles on social media, meet with politicians or embark on a cross-country media tour of their plight.
They’re too busy trying to grow food in more and more uncertain climatic conditions. Springs get warm early, then freeze, then thaw and maybe freeze again. Summers are either too dry, or maybe we have so much rain in 24 hours, that fields are flooded and wet for weeks afterwards. Or you get a freak snowstorm. Trying to figure out when to plant to ensure that what you plant is going to survive in these yo-yo conditions requires patience that most of us just don’t have.
For many smaller farmers, 2023 was a very bad year, particularly in Quebec. A late Spring led to late planting. Then it rained like crazy, flooding out fields and destroying half-grown crops. Many smaller farmers who focus on growing in-season vegetables for consumers, had such a bad year, some of them are contemplating quitting altogether. This scenario is being played out right now in the United Kingdom, where farmers’ fields are flooded in a higher than usual Spring rainfall.
That’s where the protests come in.
When your government sits back and ignores your profession, or worse, imposes further regulatory costs on you that don’t help your bottom line and global commodities markets are merciless in driving down the price they pay for your product and Mother Nature is turning nastier by the season, little wonder that turning to protest in order to get some help seems the right course of action.
In Quebec, farmers are advocating for a lot of major changes, including:
- Make agriculture an actual government priority. Everyone needs to eat. With the immense challenges facing farmers over the next decade just from climate change alone, ensuring that our food supply is secure and thriving should be top of mind.
- Invest more in the sector. So far, government investment in Agriculture in Quebec is a whopping 1% of the total budget. Given the challenges hitting farmers from all sides, it seems logical that investing in farming — through transitioning to more regenerative farming techniques, for example, to reduce farmers input costs — would be a no-brainer. I’ve also made arguments that investing in whole food would be good at helping reducing health care costs as well.
- More assistance from government in the form of richer insurance programmes. National revenues from agriculture declined 47% in 2023 and are on track to decline by a further 11.5% in 2024; in Quebec, the predicted decline in revenue in 2024 is a staggering 86.5%. Overall farm debt increase by over 90% between 2021 and 2022 and agriculture, in general, is more highly indebted than many other sectors, meaning that high interest rates hits them harder. What industry could tolerate that without some kind of assistance? None. And yet, we expect farmers to just keep chugging along and essentially pay the public to take their goods off their hands.
- Bureaucracy. This is a complaint that is getting a lot of attention in the Health sector, and the Quebec Health Minister has taken some action to alleviate the administrative load on family doctors. But farmers? The load is increasing, and the last time I looked, farmers pretty much worked from dawn till dusk, seven days a week, to either plant or harvest their crops. It doesn’t leave a lot of time to do the paperwork.
- Succession and access to land. No, this is not a repeat of the HBO series, but how older farmers can successfully transfer their land and operations to the next generation. There is a growing gap in available people to take on the work that the previous generation did, given the low status of farming in our society and the fact that most young people just don’t want to do the work. The government has a role to play in incenting younger people into the system, and encourage the industry as a whole to adopt technology to lighten the load on farmers overall. Related to this is access to arable land. Municipalities still garner more revenue from housing developers than farmers and there is a creeping takeover of prime farming land happening at the fringes of our towns and cities that needs to stop.
The cynic in me wants to tell farmers in Quebec to find a way to wrap their issues into a threat to the Quebec nation. Maybe then they’ll get the attention, and money, they deserve from a government that seems more interested in showing how good they are at defending Quebec from all threats to its existence — real or imagined. $600 million over five years to ‘reverse the decline of the French language’? That much would go a long way in keeping a lot of farmers from walking away from their farms, as well as providing a much-needed lifeline as they transition to more resilient farming techniques. And it would keep us on track to reduce our dependence on imported food from areas where the climate is really having a negative effect (California, Spain, Peru — the list goes on).
You would also think that addressing food system resilience would be a win for a Federal government being hammered by criticism on constantly rising food prices. But no. Federal politicians seems fixated on factors that have little to no impact on food prices, like the pay packet of grocery CEOs and the carbon tax. A lot of political capital has been squandered on these kinds of irrelevant issues over the past decade and no progress has been made on anything of substance in this regard.
I’m not sure what will change the government’s mind on this, either here in Quebec, or in the rest of Canada. I see no evidence from any political leader that they know what farmers are experiencing, understand their issues, or even care about where their next meal comes from. It’s a shocking demonstration of their lack of respect for the profession, ignorance of the challenges faced by our food system and a dereliction of their responsibility as elected officials.
So, farmers are left with few levers to pull in order to get their their needs addressed. Blocking roads is one measure that gets the attention of the public and the politicians. Unless there is a breakthrough soon, get ready for more. And get ready for less choice on our grocery shelves as a result.
