With the five-year Growing Forward 2 agriculture framework wrapping up next month, federal Agriculture Minister Lawrence MacAulay launched six federal programs under the new Canadian Agricultural Partnership (CAP) at the Canada’s Agriculture Day celebration in Ottawa on Tuesday. CAP is the acronym for the new $3 billion, five-year federal-provincial-territorial agriculture funding agreement that begins on… Read More
Category: Canadian Agriculture Policy
While much of the focus over the past several months has been on the pulse industry, with India’s tariffs on pulse crops, Canada’s cereal crop value chain has also had its hands full working on market access challenges. Italy, with its new country-of-origin labeling legislation and campaigns spreading doubt about the quality and safety of… Read More
The federal Liberals remain non-committal on whether they will offer compensation to the supply-managed dairy and poultry sectors for market access that will be conceded if the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) is ratified. The CPTPP terms agreed to last month would open up an additional 3.25 percent of Canada’s domestic dairy… Read More
Comparing government support for Canadian versus American dairy farmers is not a simple black and white process. While Canada’s dairy sector operates under a regulated supply management system, the U.S. government’s support for its dairy farmers is less direct. Support, in its various forms, equaled 73 percent of U.S. dairy farmers’ market returns in 2015,… Read More
Regulations, by their nature, are country or region specific, but they can have spillover effects into other markets. This is the case with many crop protection products between trading partners — a ban or restriction in one region can have trickle-down impacts on use and even access in another. Many North American farmers have been… Read More
I wrote a column last week that caused quite a stir, as was the intention. My tongue-in-cheek title did what it was intended to do: it sparked conversation and some lively debate, but it also got some tempers flaring over the increased regulatory burden farmers not just endure, but must also pay for. Read Top… Read More
Since May 2015, when Alberta elected Rachel Notley and the NDP as its government, the province’s farmers and ranchers have had some adjusting to do. Legislative changes, such as Bill 6, have not been without controversy, but we perhaps haven’t seen the sweeping changes many feared. Still, farmers are dealing with depressed commodity markets and… Read More
Last week there were reasons for confusion on what direction the American dollar might take based on White House policy. Most of the confusion last week was driven by comments made by different members of the White House team. “It’s interesting, it’s almost like currency wars at the moment,” says Matthew Pot of Grain Perspectives… Read More
Depending on where you live, fields have likely been frozen now for quite some time. Maybe they’re even snow covered. Now is a great time to spread manure because that firm ground means you can travel and not create compaction, the storage is full, and, well, it’ll work its way into the soil later…right? Well,… Read More
With the Canadian trade team agreeing to the Trans Pacific Partnership, there will be opportunities for the opposing parties to bring up issues with the deal. You can expect both the NDP and the Conservatives to use the TPP agreement as political leverage. The Conservatives, who were previously very critical of the Liberals for not… Read More