[Newsbot]

Title: The Destruction of Canada's Family Farm
Written By: NAUWATCH
Date: Sunday, December 25 at 12:29
by Arthur W. Macklin
Open Letter To Environmental Groups from an Alberta grain farmer
I am a Canadian wheat and barley producer; who values and respects democratic process. I want to protect the environment, preserve wild life habitat and I am very concerned about climate change
The Harper government is intent on destroying our Canadian Wheat Board (CWB) (BillC-18) before Canadians have time to become aware of the negative effects this fundamental change to grain marketing will have on the environment and many other aspects of Canadian life and our food.
read full article http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28118
 
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[RickW]

The family farm has been under attack by both the federal Liberals and Conservatives for quite some time now. It's just that Harper is jabbing the stick and giving it a twist at the same time.

The reason you may ask? Stats show that family farms are far more efficient than so-called "agribusinesses". But family-run farms don't make signigicent purchases of the chemicals required to force dead land to produce, compared to the 10,000 acre behemoths - and (perhaps more significantly) neither to they have boards of directors for political insiders to retire to as sinecures, nor do they make large, single-source donations to political campaigns.

[Brent Swain]

The CBC radio program "Ideas" ran a series on "The Canadian rural Clearances", comparing them to the Scottish Highland Clearances. It is archived, I believe, in September 2006. In one interview, former NDP BC Cabinet member Corky Evans, said every political party in Canada, including the NDP, strongly supports the clearances, to leave the land free for unchallenged corporate exploitation. They do this by making rural living as difficult as possible, by cutting services to rural areas, gun control ,scrapping the wheat board, rural transportation, postal services , schools, etc etc. The only politician who ever spoke out against the clearances was former Manitoba NDP premier Ed Schreyer. Unfortunately, he didn't win his seat.
In Soviet Russia, bureaucrats took over running of the collective farms. They knew nothing about farming, and those who did , no longer had a personal stake in their success. So those "employees", former independent farmers, drank vodka, as did the bureaucrats supervising them, and by the time the collapse came , home gardens produced 95% of the food, and home gardens had ten times the food output per acre.
Corporate farms have the same dynamics as soviet collective farms, run by bureaucrats, with no personal hands on farming experience, who supervise workers ,who don't have any personal stake in how much is produced. Their output per acre has also proven to be 1/10th that of family owned farms, and short term in environmental sustainability.

Expect a coming famine as a result.

Members of political parties should force their candidates to take a stand, one way or the other on the issue, in a public forum.

[Dave Ruston]

Well, of course the family farm is under assault! Ever since 'free trade' we see the main focus being, that big corporations put Canadian farmers out of business, then they take over their land and operations, only to sell us their genetically modified poison!!