AgriRecovery Relief

What is a country without the capacity to feed itself? A fairly feeble entity purporting to independence, capability; dependent on seeking sustenance for its masses elsewhere than within its own territory. Resulting in insecurity, since the agricultural activity and success of any country is its primary responsibility to ensure that the population it represents can be maintained.

In a vast, rich and low-population, natural-resource-endowed country like Canada, we have many options. Our prairie provinces are legendary for their crop yields, and the country exports wheat and other grains to countries incapable of producing sufficient internally. Even so, there are uncertainties. Our mega-farms in the Western provinces are still dependent on the vagaries of weather conditions affecting crops.

And while the country itself has huge numbers of farmers particularly around its urban centres, who produce all manner of crops other than grain; vegetables, fruits, along with the management of livestock operations, we are so jaded as a largely urban population because of our remove from the elementary need to produce food that we take everything for granted.

We go no further than our area supermarkets to pick through a huge selection of food products. Food that emanates from countries outside our Hemisphere, let alone that food that enters the market from the entire Continent of North America. And much of the food that Canadians eat, beyond the fresh produce we take for granted, has been altered beyond recognition.

We have dairy and egg marketing boards, and poultry marketing boards, and wheat and grain marketing boards, and vast networks of exporting and importing industries that bring food to our kitchen tables via the supermarket. Our only contact with the industry of food production is what we survey as we enter our area supermarkets.

But we cannot be entirely ignorant of the fact that securing these food resources that have their base within the country itself is of primary importance. Certainly the government is fully aware, as they should be. Since apart from ensuring security of food internally, the country's trade in exporting primary food and products represents a fairly stable and large factor in our wealth-production.

That, after years of serious drought, the provinces of Saskatchewan, Alberta and Manitoba are in difficulty because of incessant heavy rain conditions resulting in the flooding of agricultural lands, imperilling crops, is of great concern for the country. The result has been the largest and fastest agricultural aid program in the country's history.

$450-million has been pledged in farm aid as a result of the flooding that has assailed the prairies. It sounds like a lot of financial help, but it results in $30 per acre for troubled farmers, and it will help, but not save many from ruinous lack of production and income. It will help farmers to rehabilitate and manage their crop land, in hope that the following growing season will be more productive.

This is one issue that is of paramount importance to the entire country. Little spoken of, other than in circles where primary food production and its state is of the utmost relevance. The rest of us take everything for granted; government will solve everything. They don't, though they try, at both the provincial and federal level. Using tax dollars to ameliorate what nature and circumstance have wrought.