Thank you very much.

Good afternoon, honourable members of the committee.

I appreciate the invitation to speak to you today concerning the priorities of the agriculture sector on behalf of the National Farmers Union.

As a general farm organization, with thousands of direct members from coast to coast to coast engaged in farming across all commodities and at all scales, the National Farmers Union believes in strong communities, sound policies and sustainable farms. In our view, the priorities of the agriculture sector over the coming years will be centred around concentration, disruption and resilience.

Concentration of suppliers and market outlets for farms and ranchers has been an ongoing concern for a long time now. The cycle of mergers and acquisitions is most recently highlighted by the proposed Bunge-Viterra deal. If the acquisition is allowed, Bunge will become the world's largest agricultural commodity trader, and the minor concessions so far required by the recent European Commission's approval of the deal will have a negligible effect on its ability to use its massive footprint to influence markets, prices and production to advance its own interests at the expense of farmers and consumers.

Corporate concentration in the food-processing and retail sectors has long been an issue for elected leadership and for regulatory bodies to grapple with. Meat-packing plants and grocery retailers are so concentrated that both farmers and consumers are withering under inelastic and uncompetitive pricing structures.

Data ownership, aggregation and transparency are likewise impacted by corporate concentration. From shared data platforms to precision agriculture and advanced data analytics tools, including artificial intelligence and its outsized energy requirements, farmers and ranchers need our elected officials to effectively protect our interests to ensure that we do not end up in the same boat as the general public on social media platforms, with us and our information being a product that's sold to others for their profit while we see negligible benefits. Aggregation of this data increases the risk of exposure that farms and ranches face. Ransomware and malware attacks can affect any aspect of our operations that has a connection to our increasingly online way of doing business.

Data aggregation and sale also have implications for farmland ownership consolidation trends, which have been accelerating in Canada for many years. This ownership concentration is particularly concerning when investment funds and housing developers accumulate farmland, which then inflates the shrinking inventory of farmland that's desperately needed by new and aspiring farmers who could otherwise start new enterprises.

There's great irony in farmland financialization as a strategy by investment funds to hedge against risk in other industries, when farms and ranchers are exceedingly susceptible to geopolitical shocks such as shipping interruptions due to overseas military conflicts, tariffs and other trade disputes between nations, and of course climate events causing disruption to our supply chains, to our ability to market our crops and even to our ability to produce a crop at all. Financialization of farmland is clearly not benefiting farmers in the aggregate, as farm debt currently sits at $146 billion, interest rates are high and land prices are increasingly decoupled from the productive value of land itself.

The negative impact that climate events are already having on the infrastructure that our industry depends on needs to be recognized as a clear risk to our food security and food sovereignty. Direct effects of extreme weather events caused by climate change have been hitting our farms and ranches for years now, and it will not surprise members of this committee that farmers remain concerned about the inadequacy of existing risk management programs in terms of accessibility, speed of process and financial coverage in the event of both localized and widespread disasters.

When we scan movement by private insurance companies worldwide, the fact that they are departing from entire jurisdictions based on flood or wildfire risk tells us we must both maintain and improve upon effective public risk management programs for agriculture. However, we got into this risky scenario together, and we can work together to mitigate the consequences and to adapt to the disruptions we now face.

As members of this committee know, the NFU is a passionate advocate for a farm resilience agency based upon the incredibly successful Prairie farm rehabilitation administration. We need a Canadian farm resilience agency to facilitate a transparent and independent knowledge exchange and the adoption of ecological practices that will reduce emissions on our farms.

We are also calling on government to reinstitute efficacy testing for non-fertilizer farm inputs that would make use of existing expertise among staff at CFIA and AAFC, which prior to 2013 were a statistically reliable alternative to fossil fuel-based fertilizers. Farmers are facing more than enough financial risk. We should not continue to force them into a buy-and-try approach to reducing emissions on an ad hoc basis.

On a strategic level, we are nearing the end of the second year of the sustainable agriculture strategy process, and the NFU believes it's increasingly important that the government complete and release the SAS. Going further, we believe the strategy should be used as a basis for expanded programs, policies and funding to help farmers adopt emissions-reducing, resilience-building and biodiversity-protecting practices. Along with Farmers for Climate Solutions and Canadian Organic Growers, the NFU has advocated that the government should consider funding levels on the order of $860 million in order to meet the sustainability needs of the sector under this strategy.

Of course, sustainability in the agriculture sector cannot be achieved without a plan for generational succession on our farms and ranches. All the topics I've touched on are at the top of mind for our young members, as well as aspiring farmers and ranchers who might not be so young anymore. The NFU's youth and BIPOC caucus members are very engaged around land access issues, the lack of an equitable strategy focused on the farm labour crisis, and the lack of a comprehensive strategy around succession in agriculture, which has resulted in aging farmers relying on the financialization of farmland to fund their retirement, which is further driving farmland out of reach of the next generation while putting our food security and food sovereignty at further risk.

Thank you very much. I look forward to your questions.