[BCFSN] Capitalism for Farmers is Broken

[Gerardo Otero]

Very good points Devyn. It would be great if other people with pitching in to these debates. Are capitalism and farming incompatible in British Columbia at least? What are the fundamental contradictions of mixing these systems? Can there be a medium sized farmer that becomes a viable entrepreneur in British Columbia? This would require of course being able to pay decent living wages to any wage workers employed.

Another grim reality that has been uncovered by the pandemic is the entirely inadequate wages paid to farmworkers: mostly temporary foreign workers. It remains to be seen with all the International travel obstacles for them coming to perform their work can we overcome, or whether farmers can get alternative workers from Canada at the current wage rates. Farmers in Quebec are saying for instance that they required to hire 2.5 Quebeckers to substitute one worker from Guatemala. Recognition must be made in Canada that farm workers perform complex, difficult, dirty, dangerous, devalued and underpaid manually-skilled labor. You probably need two or three times the current levels of wages to attract Canadian workers for the same kind of work performance. Otherwise there will be a big drop in agricultural production in this country followed by a hike and food prices. It would be fine to pay higher prices if these were to guarantee fair wages were paid to workers. Currently Canada is about the third cheapest country and its cost of food. This is measured by the share of household budgets devoted to food expenditures. About 10%. Surely we can pay more for dignified working conditions and pay.

But then there's also the issue of market structure. A highly oligopolistic structure in the inputs industry coupled by a highly oligopolistic structure in the buyers and processing sectors in the food industry.

And in the lower mainland there is competition with urbanization and real estate developers. The whole thing would have to be rethought from the grand scheme by the provincial government.

Hope that everyone is staying safe. Best regards.

Dictated so please excuse errors

Professor Gerardo Otero
Simon Fraser University

On Apr 28, 2020, at 9:32 PM, Devon Cooke <devon at thehandsthatfeedus.ca<mailto:devon at thehandsthatfeedus.ca>> wrote:


I want to share a blog post I wrote that was inspired by an interview I did last week for my film The Hands that Feed Us.  One of the questions I asked in the interview was about the startup costs for a farm.  An obvious cost is land, and land is very, very expensive.  It’s so expensive, in fact, that in some regions (especially in B.C.), it could take a lifetime to pay for the farmland from the proceeds of the farm.  I’ve written about this before<https://mailer.thehandsthatfeedus.ca/lists/lt.php?tid=LEVfV1FTVlQLBB4OWA0HSVAEAw8fA1UCBxVQVQ8EWlECDF8FBQdJBQkCAAMDWwNJUwAGVx9VVg0BFQNTAgBPU1AIClcEBlACDAcKSwJYUQJUUVAPH1JdBAAVVVJSVk8ABghdS1IFAVQNVgUOWQFUUw>, but I wanted to unpack what this means from a business perspective.

In Canada, we take it for granted that starting a business, including a farm, involves a little bit of capitalism.  Starting a business typically means finding investors willing to put money into the business as it gets established, and it’s expected that those investors eventually see a return.  The problem is, the price of farmland basically guarantees that this model doesn’t work — the startup costs are too high, and the expected returns too low.  Capitalism for farming — at least farming as an independent business simply doesn’t work.

My latest blog post explores this theme in more detail<https://mailer.thehandsthatfeedus.ca/lists/lt.php?tid=LEUOAgYFBQBbUR4OB10DSVBWUQcfAAcHVBVQA1IGBFtQCg1XClRJBQkCAAMDWwNJUwAGVx9VVg0BFQNTAgBPU1AIClcEBlACDAcKSwJYUQJUUVAPH1JdBAAVVVJSVk8ABghdS1IFAVQNVgUOWQFUUw>.  It spells out exactly why we can’t expect capitalism to invest in farming any time soon.

--
All the best,

Devon Cooke
The Hands that Feed Us
604-321-9706
devon at thehandsthatfeedus.ca<mailto:devon at thehandsthatfeedus.ca>

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