Political work cold comfort now

Your column on Valley agriculture troubles (“Outrage required,” January 23) makes strong points.

It is indeed difficult to believe our elected officials had no warning the Maple Leaf poultry plant might close, and even harder to swallow their failure to work for solutions to structural problems facing the farming community.

The danger signs in the industry have been impossible to ignore. Avon Foods closed, ending a generation of food processing in the Valley. Last spring, hog farmers were lobbying politicians in the hope the June election would refocus attention on their dire need for long-term solutions. There have been persistent concerns about Maple Leaf's plans for the Larsen's plant in Berwick, and then Maritime Pride moved its egg grading facility from Port Williams to Amherst.

In June, at a meeting in Wolfville, the executive director of the Nova Scotia Federation of Agriculture pointed out the province has no coherent agricultural policy for the province. Business people and Canard poultry employees alike have been openly worrying about job losses and plant closure in recent months.

Our local cabinet members may have had their heads in the sand or been keeping their fingers crossed, but it would have taken exceptional effort not to know about these troubles.

Of course our local MP and the MLA for Kings North - now the lock is all but on the door - are making a show of contacting Maple Leaf owners, hoping, one can only assume, their failure to act when it might have mattered will go unnoticed. It's cold comfort to have our political leaders show more interest in easing the way to the employment insurance line than in building an agricultural policy that works for Nova Scotia.

What we need is a government that has the will and the courage to develop and follow a rational and sustainable plan for agriculture in the province. There are several difficult issues to be faced. Producers are caught in a system where a couple of huge retailers set prices without reference for what it costs to raise a chicken, a hog or a bag of carrots. These same retailers can fly a product to Nova Scotia and call it “local” if the transportation time is less than 24 hours. Big businesses like Maple Leaf can centralize their operations and then sell us Larsen's wieners processed in Manitoba. And farmers, historically, have tended to stand alone, despite the value of cooperating toward a common end.

We can't have sustainable agriculture in the province without tackling these problems.

The Maple Leaf closure in Canard is a crisis that must be addressed, but let’s hope it’s also a wakeup call. Without strong leadership and a clear-headed plan for agriculture, the loss of the poultry plant could well be just another in a series of losses yet to come. We’re at risk of being dependent on food grown elsewhere in the world, of having even more of our farmland grow up in bushes. That’s not a welcome scenario for anyone in Kings County.

Yours truly,

Jim Morton

Kentville