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BEHINDTHELINESAs 2004 came to a close, a bleak year in which so much appears to have gone wrong for Ontario agriculture, the tragedy in southeast Asia is a sobering reminder of how much worse things can be.The same tragedy is also a reminder of just how far Canada has fallen in its foreign aid budget. The most recent reports indicate that about 0.23 per cent of Canada's Gross Domestic Product is directed towards foreign aid, compared to more than half of a per cent in the apparently halcyon 1970s, and the 0.7 per cent recommended for developed nations. Only the Scandinavian countries come anywhere close to this optimistic recommended figure. The United States is no better than Canada, but their government gets around it by saying that citizens give generously from their own pockets. United Nations Director-General Kofi Annan has emphasized that generosity in the wake of the tsunami disaster shouldn't be at the expense of other aid, but in addition to it. There's a man-made tsunami in Africa almost weekly. Hopefully the current media focus will awaken us more to the needs of other problem areas, such as starvation resulting from civil war in the Darfur region of the Sudan. Why this extra attention to southeast Asia? Is it because western tourists are involved? Is it because television cameras were right there rolling immediately? Or is it because a natural disaster untainted by man's inhumanity to man, as in a civil war is so much easier to respond to. In this space we don't normally stray to far from the actual content of the current issue of the magazine. And we've never mentioned that Better Farming has from our beginning in 1999 supported the Canadian Food Grains Bank, an aid agency established in 1983 and made up of 13 member churches. Each year despite their own hardships, Canadian farmers donate entire fields of grain to the Food Grains Bank. The agency now wants to send cash as a replacement for some of the Canadian-produced grain that it normally ships. Their reasoning is logical. Cash can be moved quickly and efficiently and unlike the grain we export it can be used to help agricultural producers in third-world countries. Canadian International Development Agency rules say to be eligible for funding 90 per cent of the food supplied by Canadian aid agencies must be from Canada. The United States has a 100 per cent requirement for their agencies. Bob Friesen, president of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, has maintained that Canada shouldn't unilaterally ease its rules for food aid. He has argued logically enough that this might put Canadian farmers at a disadvantage against competitors in other Western countries. At press time, Jan 14, however CFA issued a press release quoting Friesen as saying: "this is definitely no time to be playing politics over our aid programs." Foreign aid probably accounts for only about one per cent of Canadian grain sales so the question for Canadian farmers is whether this is a big issue when considered in the context of third-world suffering.
As you read this issue of Better Farming the media focus will likely have shifted from the acute need for aid and we won't be seeing the trendy high-profile donations of recent weeks. The generosity of the farming community will continue.BF
ROBERT IRWIN & DON STONEMAN
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