How Can Farmers Fight Back Against The New NAFTA?

NAFTA 2.0 is chipping away at policies that guard Canadian farmers from price volatility and ensure high labour and environmental standards. The National Farmers Union says the fight has to combine grassroots and policy advocacy.

- Erin Innes 

In the 1960s and ’70s, Canadian farmers were in crisis. Farmers producing perishable products like dairy and eggs were trapped in a boom-or-bust cycle by powerful processors and distributors, who would wait until large quantities of perishables came on the market and then pit farmers against one another in bidding wars to force prices down. Farmers were forced to sell their products for less than they cost to produce, because distributors could simply refuse to buy them. The result was shortages of perishables for consumers, as well as a disastrous loss of income for farmers.

This crisis was met by a nearly 20-year-long countrywide campaign of protests, letter-writing, educating consumers, lobbying, and farmer solidarity. Out of it was born Canada’s supply management system, which maintains a consistent supply of goods for public consumption and ensures that farmers receive a price for their products that has a realistic relationship to the cost of production. Supply management has become the envy of other countries, like the U.S., in which price volatility and inconsistent supply impact both farmers and consumers.

Since the early 1990s, neoliberal free-trade agreements have been relentlessly chipping away at supply management and other agricultural policies, like quality control for grain exports, which are crucial to maintaining incomes for family farmers in Canada. Since Trudeau, Trump, and Peña Nieto shook hands over the new NAFTA agreement, those chips have gotten bigger. Dairy farmers are hit particularly hard in the new agreement, with U.S. farmers gaining access to an extra 3.9 per cent of Canada’s dairy market.

It brings the total of imported dairy on supermarket shelves in Canada up to almost 20 per cent of the national supply, says the advocacy group Dairy Farmers of Canada.