Everyone feels sorry for farmers when they are hit with a disaster like this summer’s drought. Politicians are called on to do even more to supplement government’s generous support programs, and no one much questions it.
Agriculture
The Future of Farming: – Dennis Avery, Director of the Center for Global Food Issues at the Hudson Institute
Tomorrow’s farming will look like today’s, only more so. Crop and livestock yields per acre must triple again to protect wildlife habitat. Biotechnology will be increasingly vital. Confinement feeding will be even more important, to leave room for wildlife. Organic will prove to be a fad, as will locovores and vegetarians. Activists will be less credible than over the past 50 years.
Time to End Supply Management – But it won’t go Quietly
For a brief, shining moment in the early 2000s, Canada had a small but thriving milk export business. Georgian Bay Milk Co., based in Barrie, Ont., would buy milk from a clutch of farmers operating outside Canada’s tightly controlled supply managed dairy industry and ship it to dairies in New York state.
Grain Freight Regulation has Inhibited Productivity: Grain policies designed for bygone era
By eliminating the special treatment of grain, the federal government can eliminate barriers to investment, boost railway productivity and enhance the movement of goods in Canada.
Featured News
Timeless Wisdom – The Politics of Successful Structural Reform
It’s a well-known pattern in public policy – profligate politicians damaging their economies with out-of-control spending, massive borrowing and higher taxes – inevitably leading to fiscal crisis, sharp declines in growth and ultimately rapidly falling currency value...
Canada’s National Hysteria in the 21st Century
Mass hysteria is the spontaneous manifestation of a particular behaviour by many people. There are numerous historical examples: Middle Age nuns at a convent in France spontaneously began to meow like cats; at another convent, nuns began biting one another. In...
Ethanol Policies May Be Hard To Fix
Four years ago, Dennis Avery warned that, as Western governments fell head over heels for biofuels, passing laws forcing consumers to buy them, “U.S. farmers, who should be exporting food to densely populated Asian countries with rising incomes, will instead turn their corn into ethanol … without benefit to the environment.” In barely a half-decade, biofuels have turned from the darling of environmentalists and policymakers — confident that petrol made from corn, soybeans or other plants would not just relieve us of our dependency on volatile Arab oil, but reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the process — to the target of blame for massive economic upheaval and environmental destruction.
Still Feeding The World
He has little patience for “well-fed utopians who live on Cloud Nine but come into the Third World to cause all kinds of negative impacts,” by scaring people and blocking the use of biotechnology.
Victoria Unlocks Vast Tracts For Housing
Australia’s State cabinet decided to speed up the release of residential land after receiving what one Government insider dubbed a “big wake-up call” about the extent of Melbourne’s population boom. Premier John Brumby will announce today that all available land within Melbourne’s urban growth boundary will be zoned residential — one of the biggest land releases in the city’s history — in a bid to give more young families and first-time buyers the chance to get into the property market.
Larry Martin
“A whole bunch of places that have ethanol plants are finding that their water tables are falling. It’s based on corn in the U.S. and there’s a growing dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi River in the Gulf of Mexico because of the nutrients and chemicals that are washed down the Mississippi River from the run-off.”
Is Grain-based Ethanol an Appropriate Policy for Canada?
PowerPoint slides from Larry Martin speech on ethanol as good policy in Canada.
Lunch on the Frontier – Ethanol Policy in Canada – With Larry Martin
Listen to Larry Martin speak at Lunch on the Frontier on ethanol energy policy in Canada here. (39 minutes)
Latest Food Cancer Scare a Hoax
We examine the link between poor research methodology and poor public policy.
Sacred Cows: Guess Who’s Getting Milked
In the past 14 years, incidentally, the price of industrial, supply-managed milk has doubled – twice the rate of inflation and more than 30 times the increase in the actual cost of milk production on the farm, where the number of cows has fallen by 40 per cent. Canada’s surviving dairy farmers are, in fact, remarkably productive. These asset-rich millionaires, hard working though they are, don’t need welfare cheques any longer.
Milk Price Fixing Must End
Supply management is also a straightjacket, keeping new producers out of the market unless they can buy precious quota, propping up the inefficient, and stifling innovation.