“We need to see more,” said Brandon Mayor Jeff Fawcett in a Sept. 20 news release. “Building and maintaining core infrastructure – from water and wastewater to broadband – is a priority for all municipalities and this hasn’t received enough attention in this campaign.”

Why it matters: Manitobans head to the polls Oct. 3.

Fawcett, along with Winnipeg Mayor Scott Gillingham, Portage la Prairie Mayor Sharilyn Knox and Association of Manitoba Municipalities president Kam Blight, spoke to reporters at a news conference in Brandon Sept. 20.

The local leaders emphasized AMM’s election priorities and recapped what the three major provincial parties have said on those issues thus far.

Those four main priorities are: fair and predictable municipal funding; investment in core infrastructure; investment in people (such as job training, especially for healthcare workers); and public safety.

Gillingham told reporters that municipal funding is “the most urgent and important priority for municipalities. Everything else flows from that.”

READ MORE: College’s sustainable ag centre draws campaign commitments

Provincial funding transfers to municipalities were capped from 2016 to 2022, he said. The Progressive Conservative government lifted the freeze in this year’s budget, which Gillingham called “real progress.”

However, municipal governments need a new funding format in the future that will grow automatically as populations or local economies expand and that will index to inflation, he added.

The PC, NDP and Liberal parties have all told the AMM that they will at least consider municipal input on the funding model, Gillingham said.

On infrastructure, Manitoba’s municipalities are “displeased with the degree of attention to core infrastructure funding” in the campaign, AMM said in its news release.

The party platforms contain multiple promises related to infrastructure.

The NDP have included a pledge to “reverse the PCs’ cuts and invest in highways, bridges, roads and maintenance.” The PC election promises include $2.5 billion for highways over the next five years. The Liberals promise to repair “highways, provincial roads, bridges and intersections,” prioritizing those projects in consultation with the AMM.

The association said it expects more discussion on how parties will address infrastructure needs.

However, municipal leaders are pleased that all parties have seen the need to attract and train more health-care workers, AMM said in the release.

It also acknowledged that all three parties have discussed ways to address crime rates. Knox cited an AMM survey from this June that showed 56 per cent of Manitobans feel “less safe” in their communities than they did three years ago.

“Different parties have offered different detailed commitments on how they would address crime, and all have merit; the essential point is that this has emerged as a consensus provincial priority,” AMM said Sept. 20.

The post AMM puts heat on infrastructure as next week’s election looms appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

Heavy precipitation in late April had not made them islands, like some towns along the Red River, which had been isolated by flood water. In fact, the area in central Manitoba was one of the first to see producers hit the field, in a year that had seen few acres planted province-wide by even mid-May.

For agribusinesses needing to ship product, however, the area might as well have been equally under water.

Why it matters: Monster potholes and flood detours have been in the news this spring, leading one area of central Manitoba to press its long-standing point on the need for well-maintained, unrestricted highway routes.

Megan Kemp, sales and purchasing manager for Zeghers Canada near Holland, said their company, along with many others in the area, faced serious barriers to doing business after their one major trade route to the rest of central and eastern Manitoba was cut off.

Highway (PTH) 2, the main east-west route in the region, had been closed for about a week, thanks to overland flooding west of St. Claude, Man. North and south of the route, parallel highways PTH 1 and PTH 23 were clear. Making that jaunt was going to be a problem for a loaded trailer, however; all the north-south routes in the area were under spring weight restrictions.

Restricting loads to 90 per cent of legal weight, the next-best option available in the region, “doesn’t make it worth shipping, because you’re under-shipping your shipment by a fair bit,” Kemp said.

The closure put a stark light on the lack of north-south RTAC routes — highways classed to handle heavy truck traffic and thus allowed to carry heavier loads under weight restrictions — in the area, Kemp argued. Loaded eastbound trucks were forced to detour 80 kilometres in the wrong direction to pass north through Brandon and then on to Winnipeg on the Trans-Canada Highway.

While the major urban centres of Winnipeg and Brandon have RTAC routes running south and north of them, the area between the two boasts only one route, PTH 13 through the Pembina Valley, with the same consistent lack of restriction down its length.

“At current freight prices, it’s a killer on any business,” Kemp said.

The closure cost her company about $1,000 per load in added shipping fees and added about two hours to each trip, she said. The company’s rail container service was unwilling to make that detour, cutting off the company’s ability to export or ship by train.

“They wouldn’t even come out. They just said, ‘We’ll give the container to someone else,’” Kemp said.

History

It is far from a new complaint in the region.

PTH 5 and PTH 34, both north-south routes running through the west-central Manitoba region and repeatedly pushed by locals for improvement are, “in bad shape,” Kemp noted.

Improvements on PTH 5 “would make the most sense,” Kemp said, noting that part of the highway near the Trans-Canada Highway is already RTAC rated, to offer trucking access to the McCain Foods plant south of Carberry, Man.

“Either one, as long as we have a highway in that region that is RTAC’ed, it allows us to ship during road bans,” she said.

The Manitoba Trucking Association has said that the issues reported in Kemp’s corner of the province are not unusual any time something happens to impact major routes.

Certainly, flooding has disrupted normal trucking routes in parts of Manitoba, including detours around a closed PTH 75, the main trade artery between the U.S. and the City of Winnipeg.

“The issues our industry has seen the last few weeks are the same ones we regularly see whenever major transportation routes are shut down: road safety, delayed drivers, increased fuel costs and associated vehicle wear and tear, and roads that weren’t designed for high commercial traffic volumes,” a spokesperson for the association said.

The MTA is working with the province on “highway infrastructure, road maintenance, and other issues for the development and ongoing maintenance of safe and efficient transportation corridors,” they added.

Improvements promised

In late April, the province announced a $1.5-billion three-year highway improvement plan as part of the 2022 budget, including improvements to PTH 5.

The program will support the creation of a strategic shipping route “grid,” “to allow heavier loads on provincial highways to support the shipments of goods and services across markets,” the province said at the time.

North-south routes in western Manitoba (PTH 21 and PTH 83) and eastern Manitoba (PTH 59), have also been earmarked for the program, as well as Winnipeg’s perimeter.

Both PTH 5 and PTH 34 were included in the province’s online consultations on the grid strategy, a provincial spokesperson said.

They added that a working group between local governments and Manitoba Transportation and Infrastructure (MTI) has also developed a prioritized project list to develop an unrestricted north-south route.

“Allowing heavier loads on provincial highways supports Manitoba businesses by requiring fewer trips/shipments to transport goods from one location to another and requires greater investments to build the highway infrastructure such as roads, bridges and culverts that support the loading on these routes,” the spokesperson said.

Craig Soldier of the RM of Victoria, however, says plans to upgrade PTH 5 are not good enough.

“We need (PTH) 34 to be brought up to the standards that they want to bring (PTH) 5 up to as well,” he said. “Whether the government likes it or not, (PTH) 34 is a main corridor for semi-trailers, regardless of what they’re hauling. On any given day, when there’s no restrictions, you probably see 100 trucks.”

Truckers will tend to take the shortest route, regardless of which roads the province would prefer them to drive, he also said, pointing to current high gas prices.

Meanwhile, he argued, the deteriorated conditions of PTH 34 and its shoulders raise safety concerns for both commercial truckers and the many farmers who live around and transport grain down it.

The highway is currently rife with potholes, he argued, some over a foot wide and several inches deep. Shoulders are narrow and steep, affecting safe travel for farmers transporting equipment and making passing difficult, he said. Meanwhile, a major bridge over the Assiniboine River between Holland and Austin, Man., has been awaiting repair or replacement for about a decade, and currently sports a traffic light to manage its single open lane.

“I walked the bridge a few years ago and the asphalt is actually missing. You can see the water through the bridge,” he said.

“The government’s thinking about the commercial industry, but it’s forgetting about the farmers, the ones who feed them,” Soldier also said. “It needs to provide a better highway for them.”

The province says a replacement for the bridge is in the cards, with construction due to start in 2022-23 and ending two years later.

MTI “recognizes that Provincial Trunk Highway (PTH) 34 and PTH 5 are important routes for agricultural producers in the area,” a spokesperson said.

The post At an impasse: Potholes, floods and detours appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

Consider the different realities of urban and rural seniors. For an urban senior, losing the ability to drive for themselves is still a cruel blow of aging, but it isn’t debilitating.

Options ranging from buses, traditional taxis and a plethora of ride-share apps can quickly take them where they need to go at a relatively affordable cost.

For the rural senior, losing that ability can mean being a virtual prisoner in their home community, reliant on the goodwill of friends and family, or paying high costs for sporadic service.

The needs of an aging population isolated from healthcare and shopping options have led the RM of Piney to consider public transit.

“Transportation is an issue for this area, just because we live a distance from Winnipeg and that’s where all the specialists are,” said Melanie Parent, a municipal councillor who works with seniors in the area.

COVID-19 has further restricted options by closing the border, which cuts off the community from Roseau, Minnesota — the closest hospital and shopping centre.

Large and empty

The RM of Piney encompasses about 2,400 square kilometres in the extreme southeast corner of the province. Its population is just over 1,700, according to 2016 census data.

About a quarter of these residents are over 65, well above the provincial average of 16 per cent. Many are low-income, Parent added.

A 2018 survey of age-friendliness in the RM showed residents were concerned about transportation. None of the residents surveyed said public transportation, including handi-van services, were affordable. Piney doesn’t have its own handi-van and relies on one in the neighbouring RM of Stuartburn.

Just five per cent of residents said public transportation to medical appointments was sufficient. Today, seniors can book a ride through Services to Seniors, which matches them with volunteer drivers.

Through a federal grant related to COVID-19, seniors can currently travel to medical appointments for free. Normally, passengers pay a per-kilometre fee of 35 cents, Parent said.

From Sprague, where Parent is based, it’s just over 100 km to the Steinbach, the nearest city. This would ring up a passenger at about $70 for a round trip.

“Which is a lot of money,” Parent said. If a specialist wasn’t available there, the next stop would be Winnipeg, which is 177 kms away, and would cost about $125.

Until about a decade ago, the area had reliable bus service through Grey Goose.

“When that stopped, that hurt,” she said.

Local consultant Connie Gamble, who was hired to evaluate transit plans by the RM, said she checked and it’s possible to get a taxi from Steinbach, but it would be cost-prohibitive. A trip by taxi to Steinbach would cost between $150 and $400, she said.

Fiercely independent

Most seniors in the area are very self-reliant — after all, in a community 100 km from the nearest city, people are used to driving, said Parent, but some have lost their licenses or independence. Others are afraid to drive into Winnipeg for appointments.

Gamble laid out the issue at a public meeting in Sprague on September 21, one of three on the topic.

One resident said while he and his wife are still able to drive, he anticipated a time when this won’t be an option.

With no kids, “I’m at the mercy of this or a friend,” he said.

Another resident said she knew someone who couldn’t get to the meeting because she didn’t have a ride.

However, those at the meeting worried that in an area as vast as Piney, there’d be no way to reach everyone or make it financially feasible.

They discussed every vehicle option from a sedan to a bus and speculated about adding a parcel pickup service or charter service to add revenue. They discussed having door-to-door pickup, and set routes for each day of the week.

The service won’t be exclusively for seniors. It also needn’t be run by the RM.

“Everything is on the table,” said Gamble.

Whatever happens, it will likely operate on a shoestring budget.

Gamble told the Steinbach newspaper The Carillon that financing it purely through user-pay was off the table. She also told The Carillon she hoped a defunct grant to help municipalities purchase handi-transit vans would be reinstated.

“Wherever we can scrape up money we can try,” Gamble told residents at the meeting.

Growing issue

“We don’t have any public regional transportation in this province, so it’s incredibly problematic with an aging population,” said Richard Milgrom, a professor of city planning at the University of Manitoba who has studied age-friendliness in communities.

“It’s going to become a more pressing problem,” he said.

Many areas of Manitoba are aging. Some are losing population, said Milgrom, and losing services as people go — services the older people need.

Some rural areas have lost emergency rooms. In late August, the province announced it would suspend diagnostic and emergency room services in Roblin and would reassign staff to Russell, about a 30-minute drive away, according to a report from CTV News.

This makes it harder for older people to stay in the community.

If they can’t get to appointments, “we’re losing them. They’re moving,” said Parent.

While this issue points toward a population shift — young to old, rural to urban — it also points to a mindset said Milgrom.

“In general, in our society we don’t value older adults very highly,” Milgrom said. “I think it’s actually, really a human rights issue.

In part, this is because those who have power, money and decision-making ability are often not seniors, Milgrom said.

“And people don’t like to think about aging,” he said.

“Everyone should have the right to a good quality of life,” he added. “Sometimes that requires allowing people to make choices about the sort of places that they want to live in, and that means providing them with some choices.”

In some cases, if a community is too far gone, this might mean giving seniors the option to move where they want.

There needs to be strong provincial support for areas that are disproportionately aging and losing population, he said. That support can no longer come from within the community because its losing taxpayers.

The post Rural community considers public transit options appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

“I would like to acknowledge my sincere appreciation to all the (KAP) staff, executive, board and the members of KAP who have offered support and guidance as we worked through many policies in order to assure that Manitoba farmers’ voices have been heard by our elected officials,” Mazier wrote in his resignation letter Friday. “It has been truly a privilege to serve as KAP’s president.”

Mazier farms near Justice, Man., which is in the Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa riding now represented by Conservative MP Bob Sopuck.

Sopuck announced May 7 he wouldn’t run in the next federal election, which is set for Oct. 21, 2019, unless the government calls one sooner.

Mazier is in his fourth and final year as KAP president. His term was up at the end of the year.

KAP’s bylaws allow its board of directors to appoint a president if the incumbent is unavailable. It has two vice-presidents: Bill Campbell of Minto and Jill Verwey of Portage la Prairie.

The association’s next board meeting is July 31.

“I never ever thought I’d be running for MP,” Mazier said Friday. “I often felt sorry for MPs. I saw how they got caught between party… at times they seemed conflicted.”

But Mazier said he changed his mind after being asked by three or four party members to consider seeking the nomination.

Mazier said they pointed to his farm policy experience, network of contacts and name recognition.

“I am interested in policy,” Mazier said. “I’ve always been hardwired that way, I guess.”

But Mazier acknowledged partisanship isn’t his strong point. KAP is explicitly non-partisan since its job is representing farmers to elected officials of all parties and governments.

Mazier took that role so seriously he wasn’t a member of any political party, including the Conservative Party of Canada.

Party politics in recent years has become chippier. Asked how he’ll handle that if elected, he said: “I will stay true to myself. I will criticize the policy and stay away from the personal stuff. I’ll debate ideas and policies all day long.

“I think that’s what people want to see. I think they’re getting kind of tired of it (personal attacks).”

If Mazier, 54, wins the nomination and election, he expects to leave farming.

“I see this as a career change,” he said. “I’m an all-in type of person.”

Mazier has a lot of ideas to pursue if elected, including getting better cellular and internet service for his riding.

“I am so tired of hearing ‘I don’t have cell phone coverage or I don’t have rural infrastructure for internet,'” he said. “I want a cable, fibre optics going to every community in my constituency. Full stop. I don’t care what that it takes, especially this constituency. It’s so remote and rural.”

Water regulations, land-use and the environment are also top priorities, he said.

As for highlights while at KAP, Mazier says it was the people.

Another was being part of the coalition that helped get Bill C-49, the Transportation Modernization Act, passed into law.

“Getting those amendments, just watching the whole industry and all the different farm groups actually working together under a coalition,” he said.

Agriculture has often been divided on issues, Mazier added. “We have definitely moved forward as far as trying to understand each other as an industry in different commodity groups.”

KAP has always prided itself on co-operating with others, he said.

“We were not going to take our ball and go home…” he said. “We always try to have that conversation, as awkward as it might be… if we agree to disagree that’s OK, but where are the common points? That strategy has served us well over the four years.”

Mazier also served four years as a KAP vice-president and served almost two years as a school trustee.

Several other KAP leaders have pursued party politics, including Manitoba Progressive Conservative MLAs Ian Wishart (2011-present) and Jack Penner (1988-2007), as well as Marlene Cowling, who served as a Liberal MP for Dauphin-Swan River (1993-97).

The post KAP president Mazier resigns to seek Tory nomination appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

Infrastructure Impacts on Rural and Economic Development calls for a different more flexible approach so rural communities could match program funds to their unique needs, essentially linking spending to rural development.

The current model of conditional grants for capital projects neither meets needs nor responds to the challenges and diversity of rural communities, the document, prepared in part by the Brandon-based Rural Development Institute, says.

Ryan Gibson, a University of Guelph professor and member of the Canadian Rural Revitalization Foundation and Rural Policy Learning Commons wrote the report. He presented it to the Senate Committee on National Finance in early May.

Raised in rural Manitoba, and a graduate of Brandon University’s RDI, Gibson knows rural infrastructure needs well. And how they’re prioritized and paid for right now doesn’t work well in the rural context, he said.

• Read more: Funding available to collaborative projects
• Read more: Provincial budgets make cuts to municipal funding

“Right now rural communities feel they have to somehow fit themselves into a program not written for them,” he said.

The fundamental problem is dollars allocated on the basis that they generate the biggest return on investment and benefit the most people possible, he said.

That puts rural areas at several disadvantages, not only lacking the people to merit the investment.

Often what they need is basic and essential services like clean water, he said.

“The disconnect for many rural communities is that the investment in infrastructure may not create new jobs, or create new opportunities, but create the conditions for quality of life,” he said.

“But in the current articulation of the infrastructure program it’s around economic productivity.”

The report calls for changes that would see funding approaches also help reduce what it calls the “price of distance,” or costs related to infrastructure spread over wide geographic areas.

‘Access’ to services is a key policy issue for infrastructure, for example, air ambulance to the specialty hospital or telemedicine for a diagnosis at a distance by an expert,” the report notes as an example.

The report doesn’t specify how to create a new program, but says a more flexible approach related to budget timing, project types, funding types, and eligible recipients would be a better fit for rural areas.

“Flexible budgeting should allow for funds to roll over multiple years, and allow money to be allocated based on construction schedules,” it also says.

Much of Canadian infrastructure such as schools, hospitals and water systems were built in the 1950s through to the 1970s. That was followed by a period of low investment from the 1980s to 1990s, the report says, noting much of that infrastructure is now nearing the end of its service life.

In the early 2000s, the federal, provincial, and territorial governments began reinvesting through various governmental transfer programs but the reinvestment is not matching the needs and the infrastructure deficit or gap is continuing to widen, the report said.

“The pronounced infrastructure deficit and gap in rural communities affects the whole of Canada,” it also says.

The report was jointly prepared between the Rural Development Institute, the Rural Policy Learning Commons, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Canadian Rural Revitalization Foundation.

The post New report calls for new approaches to paying for infrastructure appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

The federal Agriculture Department has set up a website to seek feedback on what is and isn’t working in Growing Forward 2 (GF2) and what should be in Growing Forward 3 (GF3).

In a statement, Lawrence MacAulay, the federal agriculture minister, said farm groups and individuals can use the conduit to get information to policy-makers as the drive to design the new program kicks into high gear.

The department will be conducting additional consultation activities in the coming months on Growing Forward, which is the main agriculture support program offered by Ottawa and the provinces.

GF2 focused on innovation, competitiveness and market development to equip producers and pro-cessors for gaining new domestic and export markets. It offers a suite of business risk management programs including AgriInvest, AgriStability, AgriInsurance and AgriRecovery.

The Canadian Federation of Agriculture has already released a detailed document pointing out problems with GF2 and corrective actions needed in the next program. The CFA board is holding a discussion with MacAulay on the issue this week, said Ron Bonnett, CFA’s president.

Gary Stanford, president of Grain Growers of Canada, said GF3 is “a top priority” and getting them right will ensure the new programs benefit farmers and agriculture in the future.

“We will continue to work with other farm organizations, with ministers and with the staff at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada to ensure that farmers’ needs are fully provided for,” Stanford said.

In a policy paper developed for discussion with other farm groups, CFA says GF3 should create a policy environment that will enable increased investment in the sector, promote climate change adaptation and positions Canada as a global “first choice” for safe and high-quality food. The group says doing so will contribute to the long-term sustainability of the agriculture industry in Canada.

The specific CFA recommendations touch on climate change, sustainability, incentives for adopting best practices, increased research, information and technology transfer to producers and processors and improving farm safety.

It also calls for the development of a national food policy that promotes Canadian products, something the government says is in the works already. CFA also wants increased investments in rural infrastructure.

Risk management

CFA is concerned that farmers have dropped out of the BRM programs because they’ve lost confidence sufficient financial help will be provided when needed. It notes farmer participation in the overall suite of programs has dropped from 119,121 producers in 2007 to 73,607 in 2013. The 2014 and 2015 numbers aren’t complete.

“The decline will be worse in 2015,” Scott Ross, the CFA’s director of Business Risk Management and Farm Policy, said in an interview.

“Our concern is that people are dropping out because the program lacks credibility.”

When funds are available, they are too often inadequate to the financial challenge facing farmers.

Participation in AgriStability, which shores up incomes in periods of low market prices, dropped from 57 per cent in 2007 to 42 per cent in 2012 and has continued to fall since. AgriInvest and AgriRecovery have seen similar drops.

The CFA is preparing proposals to present to federal and provincial officials as part of the Growing Forward 3 negotiations set to start this year, prior to the expiration of Growing Forward 2 in 2018.

The CFA proposals envision AgriInvest as a strategic investment fund that farmers and governments would contribute with annual contribution limits of $100,000. Farmers could make tax-free withdrawals from it in poor years.

With climate change expected to impair future farm production, it’s important to make sure AgriRecovery can cover multi-year disaster costs, the CFA briefing document says.

“Climate change will bring more extreme weather events and AgriRecovery is not designed for long-term problems,” Ross noted.

The next iteration of BRM programs also needs to provide additional assistance to beginning farmers, who face the greatest expense burden, CFA says.

As well, it needs to change rules that reduce the support for a diversified farm producing a variety of commodities compared to a farm that produces fewer.

Diversified farms, producing and marketing non-supply-managed commodities, have been found to more likely cease AgriStability program participation, compared to more specialized non-supply-managed farms.

This sets up a dynamic where industry may call for commodity-specific programming, but whole-farm programming is more trade friendly.

Click here to post comments on Growing Forward 3

Click here to answer a questionnaire on Growing Forward 2

The post Feds seek ideas for Growing Forward 3 appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

The Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) rolled out its wish list last spring, titled A Roadmap for Strong Cities and Communities, which identified the key needs and issues facing local government across the country.

“We want to live and raise our families in vibrant and healthy communities,” said the online document calling for a new federal partnership to create livable, safe and environmentally sustainable communities.

Online documents include A Roadmap for Strong Cities and Communities, which lays out the need for local economic development, improvements to make towns and cities more environmentally sustainable.

An accompanying document is an “Action Plan for a Strong Rural Canada” which highlights the particularly pressing needs of communities outside the country’s largest urban centres.

The top issue cited is the need for dedicated funding for core rural infrastructure to help smaller communities provide essential services, such as roads, water systems and broadband infrastructure that can’t be delivered by local tax revenues alone.

Other needs include more supports to expand affordable housing and a call for more investment in disaster mitigation and emergency preparedness. There has been a dramatic rise in weather-related emergencies across the country and “rural municipalities, in particular, need support… to address the most vulnerable aspects of their infrastructure, while protecting their populations,” the document says.

There are also calls for federal government to work more directly with local governments in rural Canada to attract trade and investment and calls for expanding affordable housing which, in turn, will help smaller communities both attract and retain their populations.

As the final days of the campaign loom, the push now is to get every candidate running to make municipal issues a priority, FCM president Raymond Louie stated in a recent media release.

The FCM website has developed an online “election tool kit” — found at hometownproud.fcm.ca — that includes a policy tracker on where each of the federal parties stand on municipal issues, a “candidate look-up” to see if individual candidates have signed a pledge on municipal issues, plus questions it is urging Canadians to ask of their candidates coming to the door, or all candidates debates.

The post Federation of Canadian Municipalities ‘road map’ identifies needs appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

Harvey Hill of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s climate decision support and adaptation unit explained the benefits that a land and infrastructure resiliency assessment could provide to rural municipalities.

It all begins with good data.

“If you do that kind of mapping in advance and create a library of maps for your local RMs across the province… then you have a really powerful tool for planning,” said Hill, adding that effective mapping can also assist municipalities when it comes to seeking financial assistance for flood mitigation projects.

Manitoba has a head start when it comes to high-quality mapping. Along with Alberta, the province leads the country in the amount of land that has been mapped using Lidar — a remote sensing technology that uses lasers to create a high-resolution, three-dimensional map.

But high-tech solutions aren’t the only answer, said Hill. The information collected from mapping should be checked against local knowledge of flooding.

“That means you’re going to have to look at your landscape, which ones are vulnerable. Ideally have some way of either using analogue events from the past or some modelling or some conversation with experts to be able to identify the kind of damage you would expect,” he said.

It also means making decisions about what rural infrastructure is most valuable.

“Some environments have lower values than others. I don’t mean that a beautiful location or individual people don’t have value, I simply mean that what a society or people are willing to invest in terms of proactive risk reduction for a pasture might be different than for a hydro dam. We can’t invest in the same levels of risk reduction in all locations,” said Hill.

More from the Manitoba Co-operator website: Small communities need to plan for big disasters

Changes in the rural tax base over the last five or six decades have also affected the amount of resources many rural communities may have to put towards flood mitigation, he said, adding that protecting the rural economy takes planning.

Hill noted that a hit to Prairie farming can easily reverberate across the globe.

When millions of acres went unseeded in 2010 and 2011, it was linked to rising food prices worldwide and even to the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia.

“Whatever the reason, they’re having difficulty moving grain, it affects all sorts of other factors, if affects the whole economy, so when we think about these disasters, flooding… let’s think about these things proactively, let’s think about these things systematically so that we can not only avoid loss of life and loss of homes, but also loss of opportunities,” Hill said. “Vulnerability isn’t something that’s just ahead of us, it’s here now, so what do we do? Well, we’re going to have to develop our resilience.”

The post Disasters at home can have worldwide impacts appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

In an interview before the G20 meeting of farm ministers, Josef Schmidhuber, deputy director of the statistics division of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), said local poverty was the root cause of hunger, not a lack of food.

Schmidhuber’s view on the outlook for global hunger also appeared to be less harrowing than that presented by U.K. charity Oxfam last month, which said the world’s food system was bust as 925 million people go hungry every day.

“More investments in smallholder agriculture and the rural infrastructure are absolutely essential to end poverty and hunger,” Schmidhuber said in response to emailed questions.

“FAO has estimated that with about $50 billion a year the world would stand an excellent chance of shrugging off the scourge of hunger in the next 15 years.”

The main cause of global hunger is local poverty, Schmidhuber said.

“Hunger is NOT the manifestation of the world’s inability to produce enough food. This has never been the case in the last 40 years and is even less likely to be the case for the next 40 years.”

FOOD SYSTEM NOT “BUST”

Schmidhuber disagreed with Oxfam’s view that the world’s food system was broken.

“The world food system is not bust,” he said. “The world as a whole is not losing its ability to produce enough food for future populations.

“What is bust is the ability of hundreds of millions of smallholders to generate enough food and income to escape hunger and poverty.”

Schmidhuber said Oxfam’s recent statement that food prices could double in the next 20 years was at the upper limit of expectations.

The recently publishedOECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook 2011-2020estimates price increases in real terms of 20 per cent for cereals and 30 per cent for meats by 2020, compared to the average of 2001-10.

“Sure, this is the picture for the next 10 years only, not to 2030,” Schmidhuber said.

“But taking an even longer-term view, there are good reasons to assume that upwards pressure on real prices could even lessen, owing to a further deceleration of global population growth, and growing saturation levels for food demand.”

The post UN Expert Urges Huge Investment In Small Farmers appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

Ever since the start of the program, which guarantees 100 days of work a year for rural households, the flow of migrant labour to northern Punjab and Haryana states has dropped to a trickle, forcing farmers such as Malik to hike farm wages massively – and still he cannot find enough workers.

“Labourers used to come every year to the large landholders, asking for work. Now they pick and choose and go about saying: Sardar (master), we don’t have time,” said the 58-year-old farmer in Kurukshetra in Haryana, 170 kilometres north of New Delhi.

“Four or five years ago, it used to cost 500-800 ($11-$18) rupees to plant an acre of paddy. Last year the labourers took a tenth of the paddy and 3,000-4,000 rupees.”

This rise in wage levels and farm costs in rural India is worrisome, with evidence it might be feeding into the high inflation that is the government’s biggest economic headache and prompting a hawkish stance at the central bank.

Food and headline inflation remain above eight per cent a year despite nine rate hikes since March 2010, the most in Asia, by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). Few expect a quick decline.

That persistence points to the limitations of the central banks’ aggressive use of its anti-inflationary measures when confronted with structural problems such as labour shortages and supply-chain bottlenecks created by poor infrastructure.

“Much of inflation is coming from structural issues and the inability of the supply side to respond to higher prices,” Laveesh Bhandari, director of Indicus Analytics, said.

“The government is not able to solve these issues, so we have to rely on the RBI to tighten policy … But everyone, including the RBI, knows this is not going to have an impact in the short term. It’ll essentially only slow down growth.”

In agriculture, labour shortages could reduce output over time. Farm labour shortages have been reported in places as far apart as the eastern state of Bihar and southern Tamil Nadu.

For years, labourers from the poor Bihar would travel to Haryana and Punjab, where a “Green Revolution” beginning in the 1960s boosted farm production and staved off widespread food shortages in the country of 1.2 billion people.

Now, as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS) takes root in Bihar, the traditional seasonal migration has declined. Local labour is not adequate and itself is diverted towards MNREGS projects, accentuating the shortage on farms.

“If there aren’t Bihari workers, farmers will soon have to give up farming,” Malik said.

Rising wages is the latest woe to hit Haryana and Punjab, which produce one-fifth of India’s annual rice and wheat output of 170 million tonnes, but which have seen stagnant yields, declining soil fertility and a depletion in groundwater levels.

The country consumes 76 million tonnes of wheat and 90 million tonnes of rice yearly, and any shortfall in production will force it to import grains.

Costing one per cent of GDP, the MNREGS is the largest of India’s welfare schemes designed to protect the country’s 500 million poor who live on less than $1.25 a day. The program has been credited for returning the Congress-led coalition to power in 2009.

Critics say MNREGS is wasteful and riddled with corruption, and the infrastructure created is of shoddy quality.

A recent World Bank study on welfare programs in India including MNREGS said they did not give the “bang for the rupee” warranted from such huge spending.

But mindful of its popularity, MNREGS has been backed by powerful Congress party president Sonia Gandhi. Her son Rahul Gandhi, seen as a prime minister in waiting, personally pushed for expanding it from 100 poor districts to all of the country.

Given the program’s support, the government has no plan to recast the system or take up a suggestion that it be suspended during the harvest season or that farm labour be included in the list of works.

Under the program, any villager can go to a nearby government office and enrol for building roads, digging wells or creating other rural infrastructure and be paid the minimum wage for 100 days a year.

That income has helped improve food intake and reduce child labour, especially at times when crops fail or prices shoot up. It has raised rural consumption, which has created new markets and shored up growth when investment has faltered.

But the run-up in farm costs from MNREGS puts pressure on the federal government to raise the minimum support prices (MSP), or procurement prices, for wheat and rice, lifting what is effectively a benchmark for food prices.

Since MNREGS began in 2004- 05, the first year of the Congressled coalition government, the minimum support prices for wheat and rice have risen 1.7 times. Haryana and Punjab also have seen the highest increases in the consumer price index for farm workers.

“That is going to lead to a cost-plus food inflation. If costs are going up, I am supposed to be protecting the margins of the farmers,” Ashok Gulati, chairman of the Farm Ministry’s commission on prices and costs, said.

Estimating that labour costs have gone up 60 per cent in the past three years, Gulati said it was a challenge to keep up with the rising expenses.

“But if I don’t take these increasing costs into account, I’m not doing justice to the incentives of the farmers so the growth process is likely to slow down. So it’s a very difficult challenge.”

In Punjab, two weeks before transplanting of paddy starts, P.S. Rangi at the Punjab State Farmers Commission anticipates that labour shortages will persist.

“After expenses, there’s little for a migrant to take back home. So when he gets an opportunity there, why would he come here?” said Rangi, a former head of agricultural economics at the Punjab Agricultural University.

“But transplanting has to happen. There’s no other way, even if it means that schoolboys who used to wear shiny clothes and watched from the sides have to shed them and get into the fields.”

The post India’s Job Program Creates Farm Labour Shortage appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.