By next Thursday, you will have earned enough income to pay for all of the food you’ll consume this year.
In a world where many people are going hungry or paying more each day for scarcer food, Canadians are fortunate to have access to a wide variety of healthy, inexpensive foods, say farmers, who don’t share the boon for consumers that comes with low prices.
Food Freedom Day, set for Feb. 12, is marked to show just how little farmers make in relation to the bill you get at the supermarket.
“The farmer is still getting a very, very small, portion of that grocery tab,” says Bette Jean Crews, president of the Ontario Federation of Agriculture.
Indeed, even when the costs of fuel and other commodities were on the rise, food prices continued in the vein of a decades-long, downward trend. According to the OFA, in 2003, Canadian consumers spent on average, just 10.5 per cent of their personal disposable income on food, compared to 12.4 per cent in 1998.
Indicative of this steadily negative trend, this year, Food Freedom Day arrives three days earlier than in 2007, and five days earlier than in 2005. In other words, Canadians are paying less for their food bills and farmers are seeing even lower profits.
According to a 2006 report by the Centre For Rural Studies and Enrichment in Saskatchewan, the most dramatic price increase in grains is found when corn is compared to corn flakes. The price of a box of corn flakes more than doubled from 1981 to 2005, increasing by $1.95 per box. However, the price of the corn used to manufacture that box of cornflakes has decreased by $0.01 per box. In 2004, an Ontario farmer received a penny less for the winter wheat that went in to a box of crackers, than he or she received in 1981, while that same box of crackers increased in value by $0.75.
OFA vice-president Don McCabe notes that while the prices farmers get for their products have actually dropped, the costs of labour, fuel and other inputs have risen significantly. General inflation has also played a factor.
“For farmers, the fact is that what consumers pay for their food directly to the farmer is such a small cost of the overall food price,” says McCabe, a corn, wheat and soybean grower in Lambton County.
Steve Martin of Martin’s Family Fruit Farm in St. Jacobs says that many fruit and vegetable farmers today see labour accounting for approximately 60 per cent of their costs, despite the fact that what they are getting in return is either stagnating or decreasing.
“Where is that money going to come from? Already there are no margins to work with,” Martin says.
With minimum wage destined to rise in the next few years, farmers will be faced with even fewer options, some of which – such as conglomerating farm operations, employing cheaper growing methods, or slashing wages – are not desirable.
“I appreciate the fact that there are people, even right in our communities, that might already be struggling to afford food as it is – but I think that’s a separate issue. I’m not unsympathetic to that; I just say that that has to be dealt with through other social means. But we can’t deal with that at the backs of farmers. We can’t expect farmers to produce it for less than the cost of production,” says Martin.
Part of the OFA’s Food Freedom Day campaign is to raise awareness about the plight of farmers today and to encourage them to think locally when buying food.
“We would ask that folks seriously consider looking at, where possible, buying local,” says McCabe, who notes that within this context there is reason for optimism as more people are looking locally.
“The bottom line is that we are seeing an uptake in ‘buy local.’ We are seeing a greater interest from consumers in how farmers do what they do for them. And education is the utmost important thing here.”
Though supporting local initiatives such as the Buy Local! Buy Fresh! program is one way of supporting domestic farmers, it isn’t a panacea, says McCabe, who confesses that not every trip to the grocery store for him involves a thorough search for exclusively Ontario products.
“You can’t always do what you want to do at the farmers’ market. I’m not telling people not to drink orange juice; I’m kind of partial to orange juice. Last time I checked under global warming, we haven’t picked up enough heat yet to start growing our own oranges – you can’t get everything you want from the farmers’ market and you might not want to necessarily be seasonal all the time in what you eat.”
Another crucial aspect of the OFA campaign is to encourage consumers to learn about the issues and demand action from their elected representatives in government. Governments should work with farmers to create a sector whereby farmers get a return on their investments.
“We’re not asking for handouts: we want that income from the marketplace, but at that point we need those short-term programs to keep us there until the long-term solutions can be put in,” says Crews.
With climate change and global geopolitical issues an ever growing concern, it is crucial that Canadians find a way to support sustainable agriculture.
“There is a necessity to keep the agricultural industry going,” she says. “We need to be able to feed ourselves to be a sovereign country.”
