4 Buy the billions


The province has made it official with all the bells and whistles appropriate to such things: Buy BC is being relaunched – it was hardly a secret – with the help of $2 million a year in each of the next three years. The program aims to raise awareness of local products, put money in the pockets of farmers and processors, and address social concerns about food security in a world where climate risks and trade challenges put people on the defensive. Well, plus ça change. Over a century ago, one of the first issues of this paper observed that BC had imported $22 million worth of food in the previous year. “That 22 millions belongs to the farmers, fruit growers, poultrymen and smallholders and gardeners, professionals and amateurs of British Columbia,” it declared in words that could just as well have come out of the current agriculture minister’s mouth. Put in today’s dollars, BC imported more than $497 million worth of food in 1914 to feed a population of 395,000, or about $1,260 per person. Statistics Canada reports that BC retailers sold $77.1 billion worth of food and alcohol in 2016, while the province’s snapshot of the agri-food sector that year says producers and processors saw sales of $10.2 billion. That figure excludes exports. The difference is a whopping $66.9 billion. While some growth in food sales is to be expected in a province that has seen its prosperity and international connections grow over the past century, the numbers are stunning.


Based on a 2016 population of 4,648,055, we’re now importing $14,400


worth of food per capita to keep ourselves fed and guests coming back for more. “Gentle reader, can you grasp the figures? Not easy, is it?” wrote our editors


in 1915. Those words are 10 times as applicable today. Buy BC is as needed as ever, and there’s plenty left to do. People flock to


farmers’ markets every summer, but they’ve got to be just as serious about buying local when winter comes. A study commissioned by the BC Association of Farmers’ Markets found that pricing and convenience keep young, busy


families from buying local even if they want to do so. Buy BC’s recognizable logo, available on license to any BC producer, may be just what’s needed to help them out. It’s been there all along, in the hands of the BC Agriculture Council but seldom used by producers since funding for the program ended in 2001. Now’s the time to make it shine, building public trust in BC products and sales for BC farmers.


Canada isn’t the cure for what ails US dairy


US president Donald Trump blew into the G7 meeting of industrialized countries last month and treated America’s closest political and economic allies to his portrayal of a petulant schoolyard bully. At one press conference, Trump likened the US to a piggy-bank that everyone was robbing and added: “We are talking to many countries. We're talking to all countries. And it's going to stop. Or we'll stop trading with them.”


Mr. Trump absolved


The Back Forty BOB COLLINS


“countries” for “decades” of unfair trade by laying the blame squarely at the feet of his predecessors, then promised to rewrite the rules of international trade to remedy his grievances. Too


bad if other countries don’t like it; Donald Trump’s America is prepared to take the ball home and play by itself. While still at the meeting, Trump agreed to sign a joint statement of the G7


nations. This agreement was quickly withdrawn when comments by Justin Trudeau were perceived as a personal attack on America’s president, who denounced Canada’s prime minister as “very dishonest and weak.” Two senior White House officials weighed in, calling Trudeau weak, dishonest and backstabbing. One declared, “There’s a special place in Hell for any foreign leader that engages in bad-faith diplomacy with President Donald J. Trump and then tries to stab him in the back on the way out the door.” Trudeau, it seems, had the temerity to make public his comments to the


president regarding retaliatory tariffs. The tariffs that Trudeau proposes are a response to the recently enacted American tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum, which Trump claimed pose a “security risk” to the US. More recently, Trump has turned his focus to supply management in the


dairy sector as the real trade irritant, claiming that American producers have been unfairly treated.


While supply management in Canada might provide a convenient foil for Trump’s bombastic indignation, it is neither the cause nor the solution to US


dairy woes. Plummeting milk prices south of the border are the result of a “perfect


storm” of circumstances, according to Jamie Castenada, senior vice-president of trade policy at the National Milk Producers Federation in Virginia. US dairy producers began an aggressive herd expansion in 2015 and have


reached a 20-year-high of 9.4 million cows. Milk production in the EU expanded significantly after quota changes, also in 2015. At the same time, American export markets, particularly China, Russia, and Venezuela, shrunk by half. Producer prices have been in free fall, from $25.30 per hundredweight in April 2014 to $15.80 in April 2018. The glut of excess production led to more than a billion pounds of excess cheese and butter by May 2017, and saw producers in the Northeast and Midwest dump more than 78 million gallons of milk in the first five months of the same year.


The one bright note for US milk during this period has been Canada. In 2017, US dairy exports to Canada totalled $792 million, while imports


from Canada were just $149 million. Trump is either unaware, or disinclined to admit, the much-maligned


Canadian milk market was the source of a half-billion dollar trade surplus for US producers last year. While the US looks longingly to Canada as the solution to its longstanding


dairy woes, it’s time to admit that it may have backed the wrong horse. Supply management is self-explanatory. It is what it does – providing a stable domestic supply with minimal surplus. The US refers to its dairy industry as a free-market, or unregulated, but it's


really a managed market where government agencies are continually called upon to create outlets for wildly fluctuating supplies. It has led to a longstanding boom-and-bust cycle dependent on massive government intervention and producer despair and bankruptcy to right itself. In the absence of any supply discipline, the sequence ad nauseum. Sacrificing Canadian milk producers might provide meagre and short-lived relief to the US industry, but it won’t cure what ails it.


Publisher Cathy Glover


The agricultural news source in British Columbia since 1915 Vol. 104 No. 7. JULY 2018


Published monthly by Country Life 2000 Ltd. www.countrylifeinbc.com


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