TORONTO - About $600 million in federal assistance will start reaching hard-pressed livestock producers and other farmers by mid-January as they struggle with the effects of a strong dollar and high feed prices, Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz said Saturday.
About one third of the cash - part of the agricultural stability program - should go directly to livestock producers still struggling to recover from the BSE crisis in 2003 that saw the U.S. border temporarily closed to Canadian cattle and beef products.
"That's a significant amount of money moving out of Ottawa right into farmers' mailboxes," an upbeat Ritz said after meeting his provincial counterparts.
Ritz offered no comfort in terms of the high dollar, which has been at record levels against its American counterpart, saying there's nothing the federal government can do about what is an internationally traded commodity.
Manitoba Agriculture Minister Rosann Wowchuk said little can be done about the high price of feed.
"What the industry has to do is adjust to those prices," Wowchuk said. "If it's not economical to produce at those prices, then different decisions have to be made, but those are decisions producers have to make."
One of the main difficulties in providing government assistance to producers is the risk of incurring challenges under trade agreements and sparking retaliatory import duties, particularly from United States.
As a result, money is flowing through existing programs that have been criticized by farmers for being cumbersome.
"We want to be very careful . . . that whatever action we take is not going to cause or create some kind of trade challenge," said Ontario's Leona Dombrowksy.
Ministers said they had made progress toward developing an overall support system amid provincial demands for more say in the design of the new programs and who pays for which parts of them.
Dombrowsky said talks about "flexibility" were encouraging and the ministers had "moved yardsticks forward" in terms of developing a new agricultural policy framework although specifics had yet to be worked out.
In cases of localized natural disasters, the ministers did agree that 60 per cent of relief money would come from Ottawa and 40 per cent from the provinces - an issue that has been a sticking point for several provinces.
Response to disasters that are more national in scope would still require federal-provincial negotiations over funding shares.
Ritz was decidedly upbeat about the talks, which ended early on a positive note.
"We've got agreement on moving forward with the next five-year suite of programs for agricultural producers," said Ritz. "It's a tremendous victory for Canadian farmers."
Also, Ritz said delays in getting processible meats, poultry and pasteurized eggs to market in the U.S., caused by new stepped-up testing at the border, had ended Saturday.
"There's no hold now on the product; they can move right through," he said. "That's a significant change in the first week of this new testing regime."
