Speakers and participants in the November 17 meeting addressed the growing crisis facing working farmers, and the need for farmers to press their demands for government aid despite the September 11 attacks and the U.S.-led war against Afghanistan that has won backing from the Canadian imperialists.

"Drought assistance should not be sidelined because of the Sept. 11 tragedy," stated an editorial in the Fall 2001 issue of Rural Life News, the official newsletter of the Catholic Rural Life Conference (CLRC) of the Diocese of London, which was available at the conference.

"In the wake of Sept. 11 it seems the likelihood that farmers will receive anything but indifference from the Federal level have heightened--particularly if we don't continue to insist that the government recognize the immediate and long-term necessity of keeping family farmers on the land," a lead editorial pointed out. The newsletter also said Ottawa will probably increase spending on "military and other security measures," and "survival of the farmers" will "drop even lower on the government's list of priorities."

"When farmers hurt most, corporations make more profits," said CLRC coordinator Marie Carter in her opening remarks to the meeting. Carter reported that 80 percent of working farmers rely on nonfarm income to make ends meet.

"As September 11 illustrated, we ignore the poor at our peril," she said, "and Third World-type poverty is happening here." In addition to the situation facing farmers, Carter pointed to the worsening conditions faced by workers in the meatpacking industry at the hands of the corporations.

Prairie grain farmer Nettie Wiebe, a former president of the National Farmers Union, gave the keynote address. Wiebe had just returned from meetings in Rome held to prepare for the upcoming World Food Summit sponsored by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. She condemned "world leaders" for prioritizing the recent meetings of the World Trade Organization over the World Food Summit, both had been postponed following the September 11 attacks. The World Food Summit will now be held in June 2002 in Rome.

Government officials "prioritized discussions on trade and transnational corporate rights over the most important problem facing people--a world of plenty with millions of children who are starving," she said. Wiebe reported that since the last World Food Summit in 1996 there are still 800 million people in the world without enough to eat. The last summit adopted a goal of cutting to 400 million the number of hungry people in the world by 2015. "The problem is not lack of production," Wiebe said. "It is the lack of distribution of food."

Tony DiFelice and John Steele are meat packers and members of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union.  
 
 
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