Andrew McClelland
The Advocate
Quebec Liberal agriculture critic André Fortin is calling for the provincial government to completely revise its farm support programs in the wake of inflation and adverse weather due to climate change.
“The reality of today’s farmers has changed a lot,” said Fortin, who also serves as the MNA for Pontiac. “Climate change, the meteoric rise in production costs and inflation are making their lives extremely complicated and too often leading them to consider abandoning production.”
The 2023 growing season has certainly been a trying one for Quebec’s agricultural producers, with extreme weather events and high amounts of rainfall making production unpredictable, particularly for market gardeners. Those factors are creating financial havoc for farmers, and Fortin says many of his constituents are saying the existing insurance programs offered by La Financière agricole du Québecno longer address their needs.
“We need to review our agricultural insurance programs,” wrote Fortin in a post on his official Facebook page on Nov. 2. “They are old, clunky, hard to navigate and are most certainly not adapted to the reality of farming in 2023. We have to protect our farms better.”
La Financière could probably attest to that fact itself. For the 2022-23 fiscal year, it paid out a whopping $287.1 million in support to stabilize the income of agricultural producers. That’s is more than double compared with the 2021-22 fiscal year’s total of $119.6 million, and substantially above the $198.9 million paid out in 2020-21.
See LA FINANCIÈRE, Page 4
LA FINANCIÈRE: For some, it has been wettest summer ever
From Page 1
For producers like Rob MacWhirter from Gaspé, the extreme weather events of the summer of 2023 led to never-before-seen troubles.
“Our haying was really out of whack this year,” MacWhirter said. “It rained intermittently and then there were rains like monsoons. It was just ridiculous. And there was so much damage to the fields.”
MacWhirter’s family beef operation cuts hay on about 300 acres in Hopetown, about 10 kilometres east of New Carlisle on the Gaspé coast. For him and his family, getting dry hay in the barn was nearly impossible.
“In all of July and August, we had two narrow windows of four days each where we had west wind and sun,” he said. “And we were in such a rush to get the early hay in and wrap it that the quality is low. It didn’t get dried down to where it should’ve been.”
As a result, MacWhirter’s operation found themselves doing their first cut of hay at the beginning of September, indicating a full month of waiting for dry weather.
“It’s certainly the most rain we’ve had in a summer in my lifetime,” he told The Advocate. “And my dad is 90 years old, and he said the same.”
In response to reports like these from producers, Quebec Agriculture Minister André Lamontagne held a meeting with the Union des producteurs agricoles on Nov. 9 to hear what a special committee created in August by the Ministère de l’Agriculture, des Pêcheries et de l’Alimentation du Québec (MAPAQ) could do to adapt to increased inflation and adverse weather.
La Financière had already made adjustments to the calculations and coverage offered by its Crop Insurance Program (known as ASREC) to provide emergency support to producers. But now, it says, an in-depth review of ASREC is being conducted to see how it can be changed to align with increasingly unpredictable weather, inflation and climate change. A completely revised version of the program is expected to launch some time in 2024-25.