To the editor:
As someone who has been active in agriculture advocacy and education for this region for the last few years—and learned a lot from my rancher colleagues, the comments about agriculture in the Throne Speech on Feb. 14 are either insulting or laughable, depending on your mood.
Apparently, the successes we should be grateful for are these; a marketing program you can access by matching half the money first; a conference to be held in Kelowna; and that donations of food to charities now have a tax credit. This last, presumably also alleviates the growing poverty for families in the province. And who needs to get paid for their product when a tax credit will do?
We live in what should be the most food-abundant region in the world. Yet we have a food system that is so dysfunctional that here, in the middle of livestock agriculture country, a producer is hardly able to have an animal processed and brought to consumers in the area.
We have a government that is happy to flood a valley with capacity to feed a million people, the Peace, for an ill-conceived hydro project that no one needs or wants.
The system doesn't work, and touting a marketing program as evidence of success, doesn't make it so.
Rita Giesbrecht
108 Mile