Milking it for all that it’s worth – not how it’s done any more. Below: Edmonton-St. Albert MP Brent Rathgeber.
ST. ALBERT, Alberta
Brent Rathgeber, Member of Parliament for Edmonton St. Albert, has launched a third “attack” on the policies of the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
But it’s safe to say the local bi-weekly newspaper here in St. Albert got it completely bass-ackwards when it reported Mr. Rathgeber had “put himself squarely at odds with his own party this week with an attack on Canada’s supply management system.”
Au contraire! It’s clear that Mr. Rathgeber’s role in Mr. Harper’s government is as the guy that runs stuff up the flagpole to see who salutes. 
Since he never gets disciplined by his disciplinarian prime minister, it’s pretty obvious this was what Mr. Rathgeber was up to when he suggested the CBC should be run as a charity like the cowed and marginalized Public Broadcasting Service in the United States. Apparently this one didn’t fly, as Mr. Rathgeber eventually dropped it.
Not long ago, Mr. Rathgeber launched a sharp attack against former minister of international co-operation and orange juice, Bev Oda, just days before she “decided” to resign from both her cabinet portfolio and her seat in the House of Commons.
This time, in what starts off as a defence of the Harper government’s decision to effectively shut down the Canadian Wheat Board, a post on Mr. Rathgeber’s blog soon turns into a broadside against supply management – the system whereby milk, eggs and poultry have been marketed in Canada since the 1970s and which is half-heartedly supported by the Harper Conservatives for reasons of political necessity.
Mr. Rathgeber proceeds to trot out all the textbook criticisms of supply management associated with market fundamentalists like Mr. Harper. The principal argument against supply management, of course, is that since it raises the prices farmers can charge for their produce, it results in higher prices for consumers. As Mr. Rathgeber puts it, “the supply management system therefore results in a legal transfer of income from millions of Canadian consumers, who pay higher prices for regulated food products, to less than 20,000 domestic farmers.”
Naturally, as we would expect from a loyal member of a highly ideological party, this simplistic formula ignores the price-setting power of corporate food processors and retailers, both sectors that are dominated by a tiny elite of massive corporations. Many factors influence food prices in Canada, as is suggested by the big variations in milk prices across the country – an average $4.45 for four litres in Regina in 2011, compared with $6.95 for the same amount in Charlottetown, according to the Government of Canada’s own figures.
Do you really imagine food prices will come down now that we’ve demonstrated to corporate food producers what we’re willing to pay? It’s said here that no matter how little the farmers get, our prices will remain high because the Canadian retailing and processing oligopoly has the market power to enforce the prices it wants us to pay.
Still, your blogger has to confess here that he is not an unmitigated enthusiast for supply management – the command and control system that sets prices by giving legal “marketing boards” the power to set production rates and wholesale prices for milk, “industrial milk” (used in processed food), eggs, chickens and turkeys by awarding quotas to individual farmers. Farmers must have quota – which can cost tens of thousands of dollars per cow – in order to legally sell the produce. This also means imports of these products are not permitted, except for industrial milk and cheese used in processed products, which are subject to tariffs.
This leads to another of Mr. Rathgeber’s arguments, that supply management serves as an impediment to Canadian participation in trade agreements like the Trans Pacific Partnership, negotiations for which the Canadian government has recently been “invited” to join. Can it really be true that the TPP countries would exclude Canada over supply management when they have their own agricultural subsidies and controls? Unlikely.
Indeed, I very much doubt the countries involved in the TPP care much at all about our subsidies or agricultural practices. They just want unfettered access to our market to dump their surplus produce.
Still, it’s always struck me as a little self-serving for supply managed farmers to say, as they frequently do, that supply management gives us consumers stable and predictable prices – which is true enough, even if those prices have been predictably high compared to those in the country next door.
But it’s absurd to argue, as Mr. Rathgeber seems to be doing, that ending supply management would usher in an era of grocery-shelf nirvana for Canadian consumers, or that there would be no other consequences for Canadians.
Given the economies of the corporate dairy sector, for example, most milk in the United States is produced using Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone. Because they could, thanks to supply management, Canadian farmers listened to the views of their consumers and considered the welfare of their livestock and rejected RBG.
So, count on it, if supply management is eliminated, not only will Canada’s small and mid-sized dairy and poultry operations be wiped out almost overnight by multinational bulk suppliers, but the economics of the system Conservatives like Mr. Rathgeber are championing will require the use of RBG and like substances. So whether or not the price will go down, which is no certainty, the quality of the product we buy will decline.
Moreover, the inevitable structural changes will hit small towns throughout the Prairies and destroy many businesses in the agricultural supply chain – and the employees they support. The impacts on our health and that of our children are harder to predict, but they are unlikely to be beneficial.
Canadian dairy and poultry farmers that try to soldier on for a spell will essentially become employees of predatory multinational agricultural corporations – which, it is said here, would suit Mr. Harper and Mr. Rathgeber just fine. (One wonders if, under these circumstances, the government of Alberta Premier Alison Redford would look more kindly at the idea of allowing farm workers to join unions, a Charter-protected right that is nevertheless currently illegal in Alberta.)
And, mark my words, urban consumers will pay for whatever lower prices we see on the grocery shelves in service cuts caused by lower corporate taxes, hidden subsidies to agricultural multinationals and environmentally destructive corporate farming practices. More growth hormones in your kids’ milk? Less tax money for urban services? Count on both!
As for those trade deals, ask yourself, how well have all those other trade deals we’ve signed on to worked out for ordinary Canadian consumers and working people? To say the least, that’s a topic for debate.
Finally, on the matter of real politics, supply managed dairy farmers are particularly influential in the politics of Quebec, which are about to take on a separatist hue once again, as always seems to happen when we have the misfortune to have Conservatives on the government benches in Ottawa. Guess for whom this will be a great issue!
So which do you value more, the survival of Canada, or ideological market-fundamentalist perfection? I fear I know the answer when it comes to Mr. Harper.
Mr. Rathgeber concludes his post by stating, with reference to the government’s destruction of the Wheat Board, that Western Canadian grain farmers have proved “they can successfully compete without a government-sanctioned cartel.” Of course, the Wheat Board wasn’t a cartel, it was a collective bargaining agent for Western wheat and barley growers, and we know how the Harper Government feels about collective bargaining when it’s the little guy that benefits.
It’s a little rich to suggest as Mr. Rathgeber does that anything has been proved, since the Wheat Board’s single-desk system was shut down only seven days ago. I wouldn’t be surprised the impacts of this policy decision turn out to be considerably more severe for Western grain farmers than this market fundamentalist government is pretending just now. And for the rest of us, since our American neighbours are already demanding that we lower our wheat quality standards so they can send inferior product up here.
Regardless, one thing is a virtual certainty: If Mr. Rathgeber is attacking supply management, the prime minister and his other minions are not far behind.
This post also appears on Rabble.ca.
Interesting article here which outlines how corporate agriculture has taken over the US as well. Looks like Harper and co want to take us back to the middle ages. The only difference is the serfs will now bow under contract to lords in corporate castles.
http://www.iatp.org/blog/201207/2012-farm-bill-congress-abandons-farmers-for-agribusiness
It is disappointing to see a respected journalist drawn in to defend the Supply Management System which does nothing more than line the pockets of a few well heeled industrial scale farmers. According to statistics Canada the average net worth of poultry farmers in Canada is $3.8M – This system is not looking after your average small family farm.
The average small family farm is locked out by the Supply Management cartel and not allowed to produce because the average small family farm simply does not own and can’t afford to buy production quota – The cost of quota to start an average broiler farm in British Columbia is $4 Million. How many small family farmers do you know with that amount of cash stashed away in their hay loft?
It is also sad to see scare stories about foreign food being less healthy than Canadian food – This is a myth that is propagated by the Supply Management Lobby but it has no basis in reality. Supply Management is all about restricting supply – It has nothing to do with food safety or public health. According to the Chicken Farmers of Canada web-Site, Canada already imports 7% of its chicken so when you load up your shopping cart you have no idea where the chicken came from.
Ironically, the Supply Management cartel also exports chicken, but get this, the farmers produce export chicken for a much lower price than their domestic chickens – Everything is grown together in the same barn and laced with the same full cocktail of antibiotics and fed with the same animal protein byproducts yet the chicken is sold for a much lower price if it is going for export. Explain to me why the Canadian consumer should be subsiding exports by paying high domestic prices?
Canada also imports milk and cheese products from various places around the world without any health issues – You probably select some of those foreign cheeses with our good wine when eating out – A good English Stilton perhaps?. Incidentally, anyone concerned that Canadian Dairy Cows have a diet comprised to large extent of GMO modified corn – Anyone dreaming about cows on lush green pastures is doing just that – Dreaming of times long past.
Understand this – Supply Management is all about restricting supply and to do this it has to promote and enforce inefficiencies. If a cartel farmer is ordered to produce at 80% or 90% of their capacity to limit market supply they are being inefficient and that has to be paid for by someone – It is the poor Canadian Consumer who suffers.
As always one can read everything about Supply Mnagement and get to no conclusion. It is unfortunate that somehow we can never get to the bottom of anything anymore. I know nothing about this issue and I know less after I have read David’s post and the 2 comments.
The only thing I know for sure is that everytime the so called Harper government gets their hands anywhere, nothing gets better in terms of quality and the money always goes to a small elite. We the people always get less and less quality and are pushed into consuming whatever retailers are selling which could very well be produced from dead bodies somewhere else in the world.
How can it be so difficult to figure out a way of producing the best possible quality for Canadians?
It ends up that all these issues come to same – The government is concerned about their friends and those who provide them the money to stay in power – so if that is the Supply Management then that is the good system. If not then it has to be removed.
I guess I know now on what side of the issue Mr. Harper friends are and that is not the Supply Management System. Amazing, no wonder no one votes anymore, no one cares and the politicians continue to suck as much as they can. I know the end of this cycle though and it is not pretty.
Hi Carlos
Supply Management is simply the management of the food supply. It is a system that limits the amount of food produced in order to keep consumer prices high. It is hard to understand because the concept, which is fundamentally a communist central planning concept, is not familiar to most people living in free countries like Canada. Most people I talk to don’t believe that it can be illegal to produce food in Canada but in order to produce food a farmer needs to purchase production rights (Quota) from another farmer. Quota is very expensive because the profits to be made are considerable. When a farmer buys Quota they become part of a farming cartel which is immune from competition (both domestic and international), product innovation, and market efficiencies. The Marketing Board cartels set the price and the consumers, like the chicken they eat, are gutted.
This system of food production has been around in Canada since the 1970’s and it is religiously supported by all the major political parties because the Marketing Board cartels have a very powerful political lobby.
By way of analogy: If Supply Management was extended to restaurants and you wanted to open a restaurant you would have to buy the right to serve a certain number of meals per day from another restaurant – That is all you could serve, no more regardless of how many folks wanted reservations you would have to say sorry. The price of meals would be fixed centrally to ensure that all restaurants made a healthy profit but you would have to charge foreigners a lower price for their meals but those meals would be subsidized by your Canadian clients so it wouldn’t hurt your bottom line. If central planning decided that more restaurant meals were needed on a particular day such as “Mother’s Day” then your meal allocation would be increased but it could also be reduced and most days you would likely have to operate with a few empty tables.
Hope this helps a bit.
Your restaurant analogy is flawed. Raw product commodities like milk and chicken are not the same as the discretionary entertainment spending catered to by restaurants.
You are also forgetting a simple historical fact. Farmers wanted supply management and lobbied very hard to get it. The majority of farmers still want it and they are the ones who run the supply management boards.
There are quota exemptions for very small artisan farmers so I am puzzled by how you can claim it’s illegal for you to farm particular products.
Hello Jim
With respect, my restaurant analogy is a perfect example and it is not flawed at all because restaurant spending is not discretionary for many people forced to work in cities and eat lunch or breakfasts on the go. In any event what difference does it make the principle is the same – You would not be able to operate the business without buying quota from another restaurant and the number of meals you served would not be a reflection of how much people wanted to eat at your establishment it would be based purely on how much quota you owned.
As to your assertions that farmers wanted this system that is plain wrong – I am a farmer and I don’t want it and 80% of the farmers in Canada that do not have the protection of Supply Mmanagement don’t want it either because it holds them back. The only farmers that want it are the privileged elite that already own quota.
Your comments about small artisan farmers are somewhat condescending and miss-leading – True there are some small concessions but if I want to make it a full time business and farm organic chicken the concessions simply do not apply. Depending on the Province these concessions allow for the production of about 2,000 chickens per year which is hardly enough to support a small family farm.
Just give me the freedom to compete – You can keep your marketing boards if you want them.
Paul K. You claim the exemptions to dairy and poultry are too small to allow a viable business. That is not even remotely true. There is an award winning dairy just by Sylvan Lake, Ab that does a good business with their artisanal cheese, and there are many such operations around Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal.
You already have the freedom to compete from your 20 acre rural retreat on one of the nicer Gulf islands. So what’s stopping you when you are next door to Vancouver?
In a democracy, majorities have a right to organize as they choose. The majority of dairy and feather farmers organized supply management boards and continue to support them. Your position is part of a very small minority. Your 80% point is not supported by any evidence and we shall have to agree to disagree regarding your restaurant analogy.
Marketing boards only work if everybody participates. You can’t have a marketing board and freeloaders at the same time. To use an old phrase “you can’t have your cake and eat it too”.
Hi Jim
So in your version of democracy a group of businesses can get together and form a cartel which makes them immune from all competition and that is somehow OK just because the majority of those businesses agree? So if the current restaurants in Canada decided they wanted to form a cartel to fix prices and prevent new restaurants from opening up I guess you would be supportive. We are clearly on opposite sides of the political spectrum and we will never have a meeting of the minds on this topic.
I support free markets and the freedom to farm – I don’t object to groups of farmers forming cooperatives or collective marketing arrangements so long as they don’t control the market and restrict competition. Of course the law in Canada is on your side because it supports your version of democracy, at least for certain segments of the farming community, but that law in my humble opinion is wrong and it needs to be changed.
It would be interesting to see who is behind the forces driving the nails into the coffin of the Cdn Wheat Board.
Ten years or so ago the answer would have been simple: Cargill, the privately-owned Minnestota-based which pretty much controls the grain trade in the US. Cargill would have liked nothing better to expand its operations into Canada.
But this ain’t your grandfather’s grain trade anymore. Once upong a time the grain markets were restricted to people who acutally had something to do with the industry.
But with deregulation in the commodities futures markets like grain and oil in 1999, allowing for the entry of speculators like Goldman Sachs, all of a sudden you had two competing interests.
First of all, grain marketing boards like the Cdn Wheat Board were set up to moderate the peaks and valleys in global food prices. Factors like weather and diseases make agricultral naturally volatile.
So marketing boards were designed to be a force of stability.
But with speculators like Goldman Sachs in the mix who thrive on volatility and uncertainity, well you know where this is going.
In fact, there are accustations that Goldman Sachs was behind the food crisis in 2007/08.
I’m afraid Paul K has swallowed some whoppers and is resorting to name calling. The price the farmer gets for the raw product has very little to do with the retail price. About six dollars of barley makes 400 bottles of beer, for example.
The Dairy Board regulates production, collectively bargains with processors and guarantees a living wage to farm families and what is so wrong with that? It’s not surprising there are only 20,000 or so dairy farms – do you want to get up at 4 AM and then 4 PM to milk the cows?
For the few pennies extra this may cost consumers (and that is debatable since the Dairy Board has the market power to take a greater share of the processor / retailer dollar which they cannot easily pass on to consumers) Canada gets very high quality milk (no RGB or slave labour).
Canadian dairy farmers have developed the very best breeds of milk cows in the world and export the genetics (in the form of embryos mostly) around the world. Most of the advances in assisted human reproduction were pioneered in Canadian dairy animals, including super ovulation and egg harvesting techniques, in-vitro fertilization, surrogates to carry embryos to term, embryo freezing, etc.
When you look at the overall cost of starting a dairy farm, the quota is not a big cost. The real battle here is being waged by the industrial processors who can realize huge profits if they can steal a few pennies per litre of industrial milk from dairy farmers and we all know whose side the Harper Cons are on in this battle and it certainly is not the farmers or consumers.
Where is the name calling K Larson? and what are the whoppers I am alleged to have swallowed? The truth often hurts, I can understand that, but the fact is that Canadian consumers pay a very high price to protect a few privileged and elite Supply Management farmers who hold production quota. If this collective marketing system is so fair and reasonable, as you claim, then why isn’t the system adopted for everything that is produced in Canada?
I must however take issue with your assertion that the price of quota is not significant when you look at the overall cost of starting a diary farm. Come on now, at $28,000 per cow – Now that is a real whopper if ever there was one. The same goes for Chicken farming: The quota cost for the average broiler farm (40,000 birds) is about $4 Million whereas the land buildings and equipment cost is less than $1.5 Million. Those quota costs have to be recovered from the market and that is one reason why prices are so high in Canada.
Hi Paul – Thank you for taking the time to go through how you see the supply management system. My confusion is of a different kind and I did not make myself clear which is not unusual at all. The problem is that your definition of Supply Management makes it look pretty bad. When I read what David wrote, Supply Management is not the end of the world. This is where I do not understand why is it that grown up people like most of us involved in these issues cannot reasonably resolve these differences without either destroying one system or the other?
When I look at the system that you abviously support, the free market all I can see is desolation on the same scale. If it is not the Marketing Board cartel, is the major corporations that dominate the whole market and do exactly the same things. With the free market fundamentalism which in this case is the opposite of the Supply Management we have products or food grown by people making 50 cents and day and living like rats, competing with our workers that are much better paid and have richer lives. These are not free markets. These are cartels of a different kind so I am not sure why such a fuss about destroying a local or regional cartel for a foreign cartel where the money instead of staying in Canada goes to someone in China or the Us or whatever. Most of these retailers get these products for nothing and sell them for close to what they would cost made here and make billions in profit. Is this not a cartel?
This is where I have the confusion, not how these systems work. I do not understand why we have a Supply Management System that is so archaic and I do not understand why people like you that believe religiously in free markets make such a big deal to move to another system that is as bad. What is the darn advantage? The answer unfortunately is always very easy – it depends on which side of the pile you are in. It is obviously no surprise that people that are close the Marketing Board do not want to let the loot to your side. Does that surprise you?
Hi Carlos
I understand where you are coming and yes perhaps at the end of the day you would just swap one cartel for another cartel when it comes to mass produced food but perhaps it would help if you could better understand my position. I own and operate a small farm but I can’t legally farm certain products in Canada unless I buy production quota from another farmer and the cost of quota is a significant barrier, believe me. When I talk about free markets I am talking about personal freedoms, the freedom to produce food and sell it at my local farmers market for example – What is wrong with that? Why would you support a system that prevents small farmers from farming in order to protect a few industrial scale farms in Canada?
You have to cut through the rhetoric; the Supply Management Lobby is very powerful and they play some clever cards presenting themselves as the protectors of Canada’s food shielding consumers from tainted foreign goods, retailers, processors and all the bad guys in the world but the fact is that the system just restricts competition – My organic chicken might take market share away from some commercial farmer holding production quota so I am not allowed to produce it. If the same lack of personal freedom was applied to any other business in Canada most people would be up in arms about it but for some reason those same freedoms are not extended to farmers in Canada.
Oh, and another thought or two. If Canada’s dairy farmers are so inefficient, why are there only 20,000 of them feeding all of Canada? What would an efficient dairy farm look like? Perhaps like some of the 30,000 head dairies in the US, along with the rich subsidies they harvest from Uncle Sam?
Lots of tainted meat recalls from the unregulated beef sector – when was the last time you heard of a tainted milk recall in Canada? Aside from some recalls of European cheese, I can’t think of one.
It is tough enough to make a living farming, and Canadian farmers have always worked together through cooperatives and marketing boards to make their lives a little better. Why take that away from them in the name of an ideology that only serves the one-percent?
K Larson
A system of production that results in prices that are double the real market price is not an efficient system and as you well know, one of the cornerstones of Supply Management is the often mandated in-efficiencies which result when farmers are ordered to produce at less than 100% of their capacity.
As to your comments about the one-percent, and with respect, I would contend that it is the supply managed farmers that are the one-percent (actually the 0.06%) who benefit from this system. If you check with Statistics Canada you will see that the average net worth of Poultry farmers in Canada is $3.8 Million and Dairy farmers are not far behind at $2.8 Million.
A 2008 OECD report found that the price of dairy products in Canada is more than double the market price, while the Conference Board of Canada found that on average consumers are paying 60 cents more per litre of milk than Americans where they have no supply management. Policies that raise the cost of basic food harm low-income people more because they spend a much higher percentage of their income on basic food than higher income people.
The termination of supply management would not only dramatically reduce the unfair prices to all Canadian consumers, but even more importantly, it would allow Canada’s farmers to access new markets and allow Canada to remove the most critical barriers to trade negotiations. If Canadian milk is, as you claim, far superior to USA produced milk that presents a tremendous marketing opportunity for our Dairy farmers to test that theory in the real world when trade barriers are removed.
There is no need to immunize a small minority of farmers from the ups and downs of the business cycle that all other farmers and Canadians experience.
“Double the real market price?” Are you saying processors should pay half of what they pay now for industrial milk?
So you want to have an average chicken farm of 4,000 birds on your tiny Gulf Island? Whatever will the neighbours and your hotel guests think?
Everbody insulates their business from boom and bust. Haven’t you heard of US and EU farm subsidies? Those are here to stay. At least our marketing boards don’t take tax money and your assertions from industry funded think tanks comparing the retail price of milk with what farmers get is useless. Didn’t you notice that the retail price of milk varies across Canada by almost 30% while the wholesale price the dairy farmer gets remains constant? If you want cheaper food, talk to the retailers and processors and stop picking on the farmers.
Name calling Paul K? I would say calling marketing boards communist, is name calling and is plain wrong in fact. There is not a lot of difference between a marketing board and an exclusive dealership. Tried to get wholesale Hondas lately from the factory? The Wheat Board was purely an exclusive dealership and financed quality control. The Dairy and feather boards do the same things, but also serve as part of the “factory management” when it comes to production levels and quality control. It is all democratic and farmer controlled.
As to freedom: on your 20 acre farm you are perfectly free to raise organic chickens, produce artisanal cheese and milk the cows to make it and then sell it all yourself – subject to public health and safety requirements.
As to the cost of quota, the cost is not great relative to the payback time as you implicitly admit. For those of us who actually make a living on commercial farms, or indeed in any commercial occupation, the real question is payback time / amortization costs. There are always new entrants to both dairy and grain farming. I was one once myself to grain, and both my nearest neighbours are young people starting out.
For those with an interest in economic history: The idea of marketing boards is to avoid one of the great defects of a market system: demand inelasticity. When people’s bellies are full, they stop buying food and the price goes to near zero. This is a problem which has bedeviled every society since we started agriculture. Trading paper wheat and financial derivatives just covers up the problem for a while as your farmers starve. Socrates identified the problem, Adam Smith described it, David Ricardo set it to mathematics, Bismarck saw price supports, minimum wages and cooperatives as part of the solution, Stalin took vengeance on its victims, and western farmers solved the problem with marketing boards. If we collectively were not so home-blind, or so besotted with Yankee froth we would be proud of this achievement, rather than wrecking it all.
You should never be afraid to speak the truth – In my eyes the Marketing Boards are Communism 101. Sorry if that offends anyone.
These Marketing Boards may be sobs but at least they are our sobs.
I forgot to add given the rise of China into economic superstar status you have to admit thatcommunism (and what is communism….a group of marketing boards with a central planning committee) must be one kickass system.
Hi Paul – I understand what you mean and believe me when I say that I fully support your position on the local production to sell locally. Furthermore I am for the small farm and family farm versus the big industrial farm and if the Supply Management system in fact stops you from being able to do that then I do not support them on that front that is for sure. I am sorry that is the case. I do not know enough to understand why that has to be that way, it does not make any sense to me.
Hi Carlos:
See my comment regarding artisanal production posted at 8PM. In fact marketing boards do nothing to stop local production and consumption. All the bread, pasta and beer (even that popular Mexican brand) are made from locally produced wheat, durum and barley (and most of that is processed in western Canada). This is because the Wheat Board had a policy of treating all processors equally. With the CWB now gone, that will change and the bigger processors will squeeze out the smaller ones by importing cheaper (and usually poorer quality) off-shore grain (for the same reason eastern Canada burns mid-east oil – shipping costs).
There are very few corporate farms in western Canada. Most are family owned and operated. The equipment you see from the highway may look big, but it is almost always a family that owes the bank for it. Share-holder owned corporate farms almost never last more than five or six years and then in my observation, go broke.
With the CWB gone I wonder how the influence of speculators like Goldman Sachs in the commodities market is going to impact the Cdn wheat farming. If the current global financial mess is any indication it can’t be good.
Here’s a link:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/27/how_goldman_sachs_created_the_food_crisis
Hi Larsen – Hard to know what is going on for sure when one reads so many pros and cons.
I am certainly glad that there are not too many corporate farms in Western Canada but again someone else may have a different view. Unfortunately once again I stay in the confused state but I learned a little more.
From what you describe in the beer market, the consequences of eliminating the Wheat Board again have negative consequences for the small farmer and especially for all of us when the quality of beer could most likely get worse.
Complex issues indeed and never resolved for the benefit of the local people that end up losing their livelihood and in many cases their farms. I cannot understand how politicians that religiously believe in the free market and that bring about the closure of local in favor of someone else anywhere in the world, can find that better for Albertans. It is mind boggling to me. All it matters to this people is money.