Only farmers get humour of baseball cap cartoon
The StarPhoenix
Published: Friday, June 29, 2007
Brian Johnsrude's cartoon in The SP on June 21 was laughable. It featured a baseball cap bearing a dollar sign logo, and was captioned: "Saskatchewan grain farmer wardrobe upgrade."
It appeared to be a cartoon intended more as a contemporary observation than humour. But when I stopped laughing it occurred to me that only farmers would get the joke.
Grain prices are up, so farmers must be making money, right? Everyone sighs in relief and goes onto to other issues. One problem. Farmers are not making money.
Few people have heard of the "profitability gap," which describes the situation where agriculture is wildly profitable but simply is not profitable for farmers.
A graph of farm revenue against input prices shows an amazing thing. As prices paid to the farmer for go up; the price of everything needed to grow those crops goes up. When prices to farmers go down, inputs remain the same or increase. The farmer is left worse off or little better.
It is amusing to hear the chemical lobby say, "We're all in this together" or corporate leaders promote "co-operating in the supply chain." The bald truth is that we are not all in this together and co-operation is increasing the speed at which the auger sucks value out of producers.
Farm revenue improvements through increased prices are captured by suppliers. Worse, government subsidies have never subsidized farmers, only the inputs industries.
The dollar sign baseball cap may be appropriate. But it should be placed on the head of those running Monsanto and Agrium. This is not to say these businesses are "evil" but to recognize the profit-seekers who harvest money from farmers.
Farmers are hanging tight to their old baseball caps to prevent them from going where the shirts off their backs seem destined -- the corporate suppliers.
Glenn Caleval
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