this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2024
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You suggest SM is not a good idea but you don't point out an alternative, beggaring the question.
Surely you don't think the American super-capitalist market-forces brochure bait is better.
It's so wonderful that the U.S. federal government has to subsidize the agricultural industry to make their free market system work. /s
Because I've had this discussion ad nauseum. The idea that there's literally no alternative to SM for dairy only makes sense if you carefully ignore every other country.
I don't know what you think the Americans do, but what they actually do is heavily subsidize their dairy industry (tens of billions) which drives down costs of dairy and causes their industry to oversupply which means they have lots of cheap milk (some of it of dubious quality) to export . If a country simply opens their market to American dairy without restrictions, it often leads to local industry getting wiped out as a result.
I am not suggesting we open our market in this way, nor is any sane person. But the subsidy model is better than SM. It's less heavy-handed, allows for new entrants into the market, and we can open our borders with caveats (tariffs on subsidized dairy, quality rules). Plenty of countries do it.
But that's the reason we have it. The US would destroy our market. Is there a better way maybe but why should we subsidize the industry to create more dairy then we need?
Tariffs take care of that. American dairy isn't magic - it's just subsidized. Dairy tariffs will prevent American dairy from destroying our market. We ourselves don't have to subsidize it to the same extent the Americans do. Right now if you want to go into dairy farming your best option is to inherit a dairy farm. Barring that the barrier to entry for you to be able to legally milk a cow and sell the milk is absolutely massive. If you want to create higher quality milk? Well too bad it'll all get pooled anyways. SM is the most heavy handed way to manage any market and it's fundamentally unnecessary.
I'm with you.
I agree that SM isn't serving Canadians, and that we should have a system that protects domestic dairy farmers and other 'staple' producers as an essential part of our national food security infrastructure. A well regulated market is the answer here.
A bit of a nonsequiter but: Instead of trusting a precariously funded patchwork of volunteer organizations, we should have a national system for getting food to hungry Canadians. I think we should leverage the existing national food distribution oligopoly (Loblaw/Sobey) to accomplish this.
Unrelated, but I never really understood how the Eastern dairy lobbies were able to dominate politics so completely whereas the wheat board in the west was essentially destroyed
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/canadian-wheat-board
Harper, (the conservative born in Toronto) the vowed to kill the Wheat Board if it was last thing he did.
Some of the Prairie Conservatives bought into Harper's bullshit. It makes it more difficult to be a competitive small time farmer when you can't weather a bad season.