Ottawa must move immediately with measures including interest-free loans to shore up livestock producers hit by losses due to higher feed and operating costs and the rising Canadian dollar, according to an interim report tabled Tuesday by the Senate standing committee on agriculture.
The loans would help producers cover their living and operating costs until other support programs become available or conditions improve, the committee wrote.
The committee also called for more funding on top of the $80 million pledged to cover abattoirs’ disposal costs for specified risk materials (SRMs, the nervous system tissues known to harbour the proteins that cause BSE in infected cattle).
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The interim report also recommends setting up a special trade office to open up access in foreign markets for Canada’s livestock and meat products.
The report stemmed from a series of meetings, held by the committee in the middle of its current study of rural poverty in Canada, to discuss the “rapidly escalating” income crisis.
“Beef producers report that they are losing several hundred dollars on each animal they sell,” the committee noted in a release Tuesday. “Pork producers are equally hard hit, losing as much as $60 for every animal they ship. Industry representatives report that up to 35 per cent of the pork industry could disappear unless they can find a way to stem income losses being faced by farmers.”
“We are not under the illusion, however, that this is anything more than a stop-gap measure,” said committee chair Joyce Fairbairn, an Alberta Liberal senator, of the committee’s recommendations.
Agreeing that the measures it proposed would afford just some “temporary breathing room,” deputy chair Len Gustafson, a Tory senator from Saskatchewan, said the government’s first priority must be “policies and programs that will support and protect our farmers and create an environment in which farm parents will feel that they can safely pass the farm on to the next generation.”
