'Never give up supply management': Farmers talk food sovereignty, tariffs and authoritarianism

Members of the National Farmers Union met in Moncton this week for a three-day convention focussed on themes of Canadian sovereignty, the ongoing trade war, and the rise of authoritarianism.

After returning to power, President Donald Trump launched a trade war while musing openly about annexing Canada.

The National Farmers Union has called on the Canadian government to respond through market interventions that will "shore up our defences," said NFU president Jenn Pfenning, whose family runs a 700-acre organic farm in southwestern Ontario.

"Without food sovereignty, without assuring our food supply as a nation, how long do we remain a sovereign nation?" she asked. "That's a reality I don't want to actually have to face."

What's the number one priority that she believes policymakers should be considering? "Never give up supply management," Pfenning said.

Supply management, a policy framework that has been in place since the 1970s in Canada, is designed to control the supply of dairy, poultry and eggs in order to stabilize prices.

It's a longtime bogeyman for critics like the right-wing Fraser Institute and has emerged as one of Trump's targets in the trade war.

Pfenning said that Canada is at risk of veering towards a food system similar to the U.S., where "farmers have lost control of their own livelihood, they've lost control of their market."

The American food system "is designed to extract the most amount of profit for the least input," she said.

"And what that does is it degrades the value of the food itself, so you have no care for how nutritious it is, what the environmental impacts are of it, how whatever might be contained in it, or how it impacts the community where it's being produced."

Supply management also came up during a question-and-answer session with keynote speakers Charlie Angus and Brit Griffin.

Angus, who was the longtime NDP MP for Timmins–James Bay, recalled conversations with American union organizers who warned about low standards in the U.S. poultry sector.

"They were like, 'Man, if you let supply management go, do you know what you're getting? Do you know what it's like in those chicken slaughtering plants in the southern United States? You're going to flood your market with that. Right now, you've got safe supply of chicken. You've got union jobs. You've got farms.'"

This video report includes clips from interviews with Pfenning and others convention attendees, followed by uncut footage from the keynote talk by Angus and Griffin, who spoke about their decades-long relationship and their experiences in social justice movements.

David Gordon Koch is a staff reporter for the NB Media Co-op. Data Brainanta, an NB Media Co-op volunteer and activist, also contributed to this story. This reporting has been made possible in part by the Government of Canada via the Local Journalism Initiative.