I'd like to begin by presenting the case of Russia. The top economic priority of the USSR was to get peasants off the land and into urban factories. This brought Russia through the Industrial Revolution in fifteen years. The GDP of the USSR grew annually by doubt digit percentages through much of the twenties and thirties. Literacy rates exploded and Russia became a great, if unrefined, industrial power, on the strengths of her huge population and unparalleled natural resources.
Soviet agricultural policy was corrupted by the progressive ideology of Marxism-Leninism. The USSR never developed an agricultural sector of comparable productive or, equally important, distributive power to that of the USA, even though Soviet science and engineering were in some ways the superiors of their American counterparts. (The Party endorsement of Lysenko's theory of evolution, a Lamarckian theory, also retarded argicultural research in such vital areas as crop hybridization.)
It is a canard in the USA that Reagan drove the USSR to economic collapse by high levels of military spending. I will not consider whether this is true or false, but I will point out that food supplies in Russian cities became increasingly unstable in the late 1980's and were a prime motivator in Gorbachev's final dismantling of the USSR as such.
This must be contrasted with the USA. In the 1900's and teens, there was no such thing as winter vegetables north of the Mason-Dixon line; in the winter, you ate what you had canned in the fall, supplemented by dairy foods, sketchy meat from Chicago, and starchy staples that kept easily. In general, one of the things inclining people dwelling in cold cimates to eat so much meat was that animals could be kept alive until needed, while plants stopped producing once their growing season ended.
The development of California agriculture caused a profound shift in American eating habits. Today, I can walk into Wegman's in Rochester, NY, in the dead of winter, and buy fresh-looking produce shipped from California, Chile, and even Israel. This was entirely unheard of until the development of such potent food preservation and transportation techniques so that lettuce could be shipped 3000 miles and arrive still crisp. Meanwhile, in Eastern Europe, many professionals - doctors, lawyers, scientists - still cultivate garden vegetables and can them in the autumn, because the ones on the shelves in the winter are so sparse, poor, and expensive, that they're not worth it for most people.
The economic impact of this cannot be overstated. Corporations tie themselves in knots trying to figure out how to use skilled workers more effectively. Meanwhile, in the xUSSR, unless you're part of the richest 1%, you have to waste all kinds of time and energy to produce food that is probably less nutritious (certainly if canned) than the bland but reliable California produce that Americans buy on a thirty-minute weekly jaunt to the store. Consider how many physics PhD man-hours in Russia are spent tilling the soil out of necessity, then compare that hypothetical number to the corresponding one in the USA. Then extend this across all industries; factory work is more profitable than gardening, but without high agricultural surpluses, all must garden. In the USA, corn is so cheap that, in season, it is essentially free; around 16 cents a cob, or in other words, six cobs (enough corn for one person to eat for at least two days) for the price of a can of Coke. This is extremely good for the American economy. Food only need occupy a small part of household budgets, unless you constantly eat out, another option never before available (it was usually cheaper to have dedicated servants in the home than to go to restaurants at the turn of the previous century.) The USA began laying the groundwork for this in the 1850's, leading to such phenomena as gourmet free lunches in New York bars in the 1870's, as some food prices fell so far below the traditional price of luxuries that it became temporarily economically viable to give lobster and steak to drinking customers. More to the point of this diary, the cheaper food gets, the more people are able to feed themselves by working in other sectors; cheap food is good for society.
So what does this have to do with Canadian agricultural policy? The USA has seen high rates of attrition among farmers from the 1950's to the present day, as a government increasingly less inclined to subsidize agriculture has led to many families moving off the land. This is a good thing, economically, because those families are genrally engaged in more productive urban occupations today. However, the high levels of attrition allowed agribusiness concerns to buy out more and more farmers, a trend that once begun is hard to stop. Today, agribusiness owns most farmland in the USA; many farm workers are simply tenants, with no stake in the land, and only the company's paycheque to motivate them. Meanwhile, argibusiness has Bush's ear and receives billions a year in free money from the US government.
Canada has a much stronger culture of family farming than does the USA today. This has to do more with Canada's later industrialization and colonization of the Prairies than anything else. My family homesteaded in Saskatchewan in 1908, perhaps fifty years after the average Midwestern family homesteaded, and in consequence, Canadian farmers have been later moving off the land.
In the 1970s, the Canadian government decided to passively allow high rates of attrition among farmers in a misguided attempt to industrialize Western Canada. As no adequate capitalization was provided (and one wonders about industrial growth in places so removed from foreign markets anyway,) the result was the flight of farm families to the cties and to other provinces. At this point, many farmers have jobs in the cities during the off season - effectively subsidizing their own farms from their wages - and high rates of attrition have cut every trace of fat; the only farmers still in business are the very best ones. All the farmers I know under 70 spend a lot of their time ordering technique binders for new crop varieties, doing courses on pulse processing, investing in exotic equipment such as air seeders, and figuring out ways to diversify their rotations even further. They are a serious bunch.
Farmers fear agribusiness to a man. Many have seen what happened to their friends and relatives in the midwestern USA and are terrified of becoming tenants on their own land. They also fear how the agribusiness concerns would treat the land - poorly, in order to maximize short-term production and achieve economies of uniform planning. This is empirically borne out by the much more severely levels of erosion in the midwestern USA. You can see the difference quite clearly on false-colour satellite photos.
One result of farmers' frustration has been the development of a national divide running north-south along the Manitoba-Ontario border. The West went almost completely Conservative in the recent election, despite being the traditional home of the NDP (Canada's left-of-Democrat party, founded originally as a farmer's cooperative in Saskatchewan.) The Westerns I know feel that their concerns about the collapse of agriculture fall on deaf and ignorant ears among Ontario policians, who control the balance of power by virtue of the population of Toronto. They feel abandoned by the federal NDP; many people now vote NDP provincially and Conservative federally, which is quite a contradiction at first glance.
In my considered opinion, Canadian agricultural policy is more shaped by ignorance, callousness, lack of communication, and the lack of a Liberal stake in Western Canada, than by the economic uselessness of unviability of farming. We need to keep the farming sector strong so that we can continue to benefit from cheap food, freedom from influence of destructive agribusiness concerns, and comparatively economically sound land-maintenece techniques. If the situation does not change, Canada will have squandered a valuable opportunity.
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