Revamped CAAP program too general, too national says Ontario farm leader

Thursday, May 29, 2014

by SUSAN MANN

The just released renewed Canadian Agricultural Adaptation program is too general and too national in scope to really have much potential value for Ontario agriculture, says a provincial farm leader.

“Only things that are important to the federal government will actually be funded,” notes Mark Wales, president of the Ontario Federation of Agriculture.

Federal Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz announced May 26 in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan that Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada has launched a renewed five-year Canadian Agricultural Adaptation program. It runs from this year until 2019 and $50.3 million is available for investments in industry-led projects to help the farming industry “seize opportunities, respond to emerging issues and investigate and pilot approaches to deal with new and ongoing challenges,” according the government’s press release. “The renewed program will enable the agricultural industry to proactively tap into opportunities and tackle unforeseen challenges.”

The program is open now and applications are being accepted on a continuous basis until funds are fully utilized, the release says.

The $50.3 million earmarked for the renewed program is $112.7 million less than the $163 million earmarked for the previous five-year agricultural adaptation program, which ran from 2009 to 2014. Ontario got $28 million of that $163 million, Wales notes.

Wales says the renewed program “takes away any regional prioritization whatsoever” and provides less funding for Ontario. The federal agriculture department in Ottawa is now doing all of the application processing rather than the local, provincial adaptation councils, such as the one in Ontario. “There’s no local decision-making as to acceptable or unacceptable projects,” he says.

It’s also going to be a lot harder for any group or organization in Ontario “to even get to do a project under CAAP (the agricultural adaptation program),” he notes.  

Even though the federal government says it wants projects to be national or sector-wide in scope “they allow a little bit of opportunity for provincial projects,” he says, noting they don’t know yet how much flexibility the government will allow.

Although there’s a lot less money earmarked for the agricultural adaptation program, the Growing Forward 2 non-business risk management funding “has been substantially increased,” he says, noting provinces can prioritize how that funding is allocated. For Ontario, there’s separate funding for the processing industry, organizations and separate funding for farmers “all of it geared towards innovation and so on. They’ve increased one pot but they’ve taken the other pot down.”

Wales says the federation hasn’t done a comparison yet, but the increased funding for non-business risk management programs under Growing Forward 2 probably offsets the less money available for the agricultural adaptation program. That comparison hasn’t been done yet because “we’ve only just finished the first year of Growing Forward 2, which finished on March 31,” he says. BF