EDITORIAL
Farm organizations need to return to original mandate

Unfortunately, the farm lobby in Ontario is almost non-existent. MPP Bill Murdock, agricultural advisor with provincial leader hopeful Chris Stockwell, speaking from Toronto said: "If we (Stockwell) regulate, we'll pay out the money."

But Minister of Agriculture Brian Coburn, who backs Ernie Eves, apparently the front runner, has failed to get a deal with the federal government on safety nets and the only thing that lingers from that effort is the smell of stale rhetoric.

Among farm organizations, only the Ontario Federation of Agriculture has any kind of organized lobbying effort in the current Tory leadership campaign.

The grains and oil seeds groups are doing plenty of talking but seem to be "Waiting for Godot." He isn't going to show up and neither is financial help for farmers caught between low grain prices, caused by U.S. subsidies, and monopolies buying below the U.S. market value. The situation has become so bad for white wheat growers that they're contacted a lawyer to study a class action suit.

What's the justification for such a move? Farm commodity groups more and more are being run like bureaucracies, without the responsibility to produce. They don't know that love and money aren't made by memorandum. Dairy Farmers of Ontario (DFO), running a deficit budget for the third year, has lost three and a half per cent of its milk sales. It sent $11 million to Dairy Farmers of Canada (DFC) for advertising, which the executive can probably explain very nicely. But from the outside DFC looks like government tax and spend. DFC rewards itself like government, too. The average salary at DFC is $64,444.

Farm organizations seem to grow and grow at the top, their tentacles reaching for lucrative contracts from government or from something environmental. They're busy improving wells, 

providing inspection systems, introducing someone's program.

Some of that might be all right. But farm organizations in recent years have not represented farmers well at the government level. Too often, the argument has been that "we represent only 2.5 per cent of the population." True. But last year agriculture represented 10 per cent of Canada's exports. That's 10 per cent more than environmentalist exported.