June 2008 Archives

The 15th annual Farming For... Profit? conference was held earlier this week in Moose Jaw. Topics on this year's agenda included the future of agricultural policy, agriculture's role in the global food crisis, transportation issues, and the challenges faced by the Canadian livestock sector in the face of rising grain prices and a falling U.S. dollar. Conference participants included producers, producer group and industry association representatives, industry players and commentators, academics and personnel from both provincial and federal governments.

Blog entries from early May ("Just Fiddlin...?" and "Just Fiddlin...? (Part 2)") painted a picture of the extent of unresolved policy issues in Canadian agriculture. As we indicated in those earlier entries we would post follow-up blog entries to estimate the costs of having improperly aligned policy. This entry is the second follow-up entry. In this entry we provide a rough cost estimate of the widened canola basis in the commodity market. The estimates that we provide are by no means a complete costing of the issues; in fact we encourage comments on our assumptions and alternative ways to valuate the policy issues.

Preliminary estimates show that the costs of an erratic canola basis could be in the range of $100 in a one-time loss to an annual $400 million loss (see Table 1). This cost is one that is borne entirely by farmers (as the entry from two weeks ago indicated (link), the costs associated with transportation problems are split between farmers and other system players).

Policy development is an intensive process of "research, analysis, consultation and synthesis of information to produce recommendations" for direction or specific action on an issue (MB Office of Auditor General 2003). It can take months and even years to develop policy. Bringing the right people into the process often means bringing in people with already stretched time resources, which can limit the timeliness of policy development. Are there ways to speed up the process and be more accommodating to the heavy workloads of individuals?

The Saskatchewan Soil Conservation Association (SSCA) is launching its on-line journal at this year's Western Canadian Farm Progress Show (website). KIS introduced the journal in the May 22nd blog entry. This week we post the last of our previews - article summaries - from the upcoming journal. If you have not already done so, please read the May 22nd entry Juanita Polegi, SSCA Project Manager, to learn more about the Ag Tech Journal.