Ontario Advocates for Better Risk Management Through Growing Forward 2
Posted: July 22, 2013
Categories: Food in the News / Food in the News / News from Sustain Ontario / The Meat Press
Over the weekend, provincial, federal, and territorial agriculture ministers met in Halifax, Nova Scotia to discuss the nation’s food and farming sector. At the heart of the meeting was both a reaffirmation and review of Canada’s food security policies, namely supply and risk management. It’s a heady topic these days as extreme heat, storms and other unpredictable weather cause disruptions in our agricultural regions. And considering Canada set a new record last year, exporting $47.7 billion of food to 189 countries, these strategies are paramount to protecting not only our food supply, but our economic vitality.
Some farmers, though, want to see their elected officials doing more to protect them from the volatility of nature and the free market. Mark Wales, the president of the Ontario Federation of Agriculture, has asked that Ontario establish a more diverse risk insurance framework for producers which includes beef, pork, sheep, veal, grains, and oilseed. The government is listening, spokespeople reassured, pointing to a new plan through Growing Forward 2, the national agricultural policy fund, that will provide insurance coverage for “livestock, predominantly cattle and pork” noting that “it will be a price-based insurance and not cost-of-production”. This new package should be available in late 2014.