Agriculture is Ontario’s top economic driver, says ag minister

RIDGETOWN — The newly appointed minister of agriculture, food and rural affairs is a cheerful man looking to make new friends.

So it didn’t hurt when he told an audience of 1,000 farmers in Ridgetown on Jan. 5 that Ontario’s agricultural industry is the single most important economic driver in the province today.

If that isn’t enough to make one smile, Ted McMeekin added that the industry contributes more than $33 billion annually to Ontario’s GDP and sustains more than 700,000 jobs.

Wow. And that’s not all. "We have the most diverse agricultural industry in Canada, producing more than 200 commodities and we have the largest food processing industry in Canada, with more than 3,000 food processing establishments," he said.

Agriculture is certainly important in terms of creating wealth and jobs. But how do we know that agriculture is number one? It depends on what you measure. Do you measure the number of jobs on the farm with the number of jobs in other sectors? That would make farming a very unimportant industry as fewer than two per cent of the population lives on a farm.

The federal government says that agriculture and food generates one in eight jobs but includes jobs in food services, including restaurants, and wholesale and retail foods. Until auto plants closed down, the often heard claim was that the auto industry provided one in six jobs in Ontario. But that statistic has the opposite problem. It doesn’t include auto sales dealerships, service stations, repair and detailing shops and other related businesses.

The federal government says that the agriculture and food sector accounts for 8 per cent of Canada’s GDP (gross domestic product, which measures the value of a good or service produced) and again includes foods services, wholesale and retail, most of which would still exist even if there were no farms and all of our food were imported.

If you look only at the value of on-farm production, the GDP would drop below 4 per cent. But it’s hardly fair to not include the slaughterhouses or processing plants as part of agriculture. Without farm products, these businesses wouldn’t exist.

Finding the right figures to compare "is like chasing your tail," said George Morris Centre executive director Bob Seguin. No matter what you come up with "There can be another interpretation and your numbers won’t be someone else’s numbers."

So, indeed Ontario’s agricultural industry is the single most important economic driver in the province today and if you give me enough time I’ll find the statistics to prove it.