This brings the available funds up to just over $1 billion. But this is far short of the modest request by provincial government-sponsored delegations from Manitoba and Saskatchewan for $1.3 billion in additional aid for farmers facing the worst economic crisis in that region since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Yakimchuk was among the dozen farmers with whom a team of socialist workers from Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver met in mid-October. The goal of this trip was to learn more about the conditions the farmers are facing and how they are fighting back. These meetings became an exchange between workers and farmers on how to work together to defend ourselves.

Over the past year Saskatchewan farmers organized a series of protests to demand aid, including one of 1,000 farmers in Rosedale in November 1998, and at least two of 1,000 farmers and supporters in Regina, the capital city, last March and June. At the beginning of August they organized roadblocks in different parts of the province. And on August 17 a tractorcade of more than 1,000 farmers tied up the streets of Regina.

The actions were organized and led not by the traditional farmers' organizations, but by an organization of activist farmers called the Bengough Rally group. The organization has now changed its name to the Pro-West Rally group.  
 

The worst crisis since the 1930s

Saskatchewan, a province in western Canada, has a population of 1 million and supplies 28 percent of Canada's grain production. Crops include canola, rye, oats, barley, and flaxseed, as well as wheat. Canada accounts for 10 percent of the grain exports in the world, third after the United States, which exports 40 percent of the total, and France, which exports 12 percent.

An average farm in Saskatchewan is 1,000 acres. According to Statistics Canada, 65,700 people in the province make a living directly from agriculture. Last year 4,900 people left the land there, about 7.5 percent of the farm population.

This year's harvest is the second biggest on record, but farmers in Saskatchewan can expect to lose, per acre after expenses, including property taxes, machinery depreciation, and land investment: $47.78 on spring wheat, $55.70 on feed barley, $81.59 on oats, $55.09 on flax, $28.16 on lentils, and $36.17 on canola. Net farm income dropped 41 percent in Saskatchewan last year.

The facts are not all in for this year's harvest but the federal government in Ottawa predicts this will be the worst year for farm income since statistics were first recorded in 1926. Yakimchuk, who farms 1,000 acres near Wakaw, an hour's drive east of Saskatoon, summed up the situation facing them when he said, "The guy producing the food is in the food bank line."

Bob Thomas, a farmer near Milestone south of Regina, explained that in order to keep the farm going he has two jobs and sold off cattle in order to pay the bills. "When we started organizing the tractor rallies, it was a great boost for a lot of farmers because we found out how many of us were going bankrupt and that it wasn't our fault that we were losing money," he said. A theme commonly promoted by the big capitalist farmers, bourgeois politicians, and the big-business media is that small farmers' problems are the result of bad management.

Yakimchuk related the case of a friend of the family who was forced by the bank to auction off his land and his machinery in order to pay off loans. "This is starting to happen big time now," he said.  
 

Doubly squeezed

The farmers are being squeezed between the high prices that huge corporations such as Cargill, Monsanto, and Imperial Oil require them to pay for inputs such as seed, fertilizer, pesticides, and fuel and the low prices they are receiving for their produce from the big companies that process and market it. Farmers have also been badly hit by the trend for the prices of commodities to fall on the world market—an aspect of the deflationary slide in the world capitalist economy.

Harvey Linnen, near Raymore, described how farmers are forced to pay "deferred input" bills in order to get seeds, fertilizer, and fuel if they don't have the money. "If you can't pay it off on time, Imperial Oil charges 24 percent interest and Cargill charges 18 percent retroactive from the time you signed the bill," he said. All the farmers emphasized the enormous gap between the money they receive for their grain and the price consumers pay for the product in the supermarket.

Farmers in Saskatchewan are also being hit by major cuts in federal subsidies for transportation of their product by rail to ports on the West Coast or the Great Lakes. "I can pay from 30 to 50 percent of the check I get on transportation costs, depending on the product," said Linnen.  
 

Discussion on what way forward

The Pro-West Rally group calls for an immediate cash injection of $80 per acre, worth about $3 billion in Saskatchewan. Thomas explained that the biggest benefactors in Saskatchewan under the AIDA program are the industrial hog producers. "The government jimmied the figures so that the family farmer wouldn't collect," he said.

In making its case to the federal government for aid, representatives of the New Democratic Party (NDP) government in Saskatchewan argue that wheat farmers in Europe receive 56 cents of every dollar they earn as a subsidy from their government, farmers in the United States receive 38 cents and that farmers in Canada only receive 9 cents. The NDP is a social democratic party based on the trade unions outside of Quebec. Saskatchewan NDP agriculture and food minister Dwain Lingenfelter called on Ottawa to negotiate a substantial reduction in European and U.S. grain subsidies at the World Trade Organization talks in Seattle, which is the approach the federal government takes.

The new Saskatchewan government is a coalition of the NDP and the Liberal Party, one of Canada's traditional capitalist parties. The coalition government was formed after the NDP lost ground to the right-wing Saskatchewan Party in last September's provincial election.This party, making its electoral debut, got considerable support in rural areas promising tax cuts and immediate aid to farmers as well as a long-term safety net program to protect farmers against the "international agricultural trade war."

The farmers discussed with the socialist workers their ideas on the source of the problem and what the solution is. These discussions reflected openness to listening and considering radical solutions from different and opposing class forces.

One idea that is popular among farmers is "western separation," since the problem is seen as being the "East." Linked to this is the idea that Saskatchewan farmers are paying exorbitant taxes to Ottawa from which they don't benefit and that an effective way to resist would be to organize a tax revolt.

In the discussions, the socialist activists pointed out that it is not the workers and other farmers in the eastern industrial centers of Canada who benefit from the exploitation of the labor of the farmers in the West. Christian Cornejo, a member of the United Food and Commercial Workers in a meatpacking plant in Toronto, argued that workers and farmers should work together against the corporations that exploit their labor. "The company pays low prices to the hog producers, and has cut our wages in the plant by 40 percent after a hard-fought strike. Yet the price of pork at the supermarket remains the same," he said.

In one of the meetings there was an exchange on the role of the Canadian Wheat Board, which is a marketing board set up in 1935 after several decades of struggle by farmers against the big grain companies. The goal was to regulate the market and achieve stable prices for their products, especially for smaller, less competitive farmers.

Today there is a campaign by better-off farmers and the big grain corporations to abolish the Wheat Board. The platform of the Saskatchewan Party called for weakening the Canada Wheat Board "to give farmers a choice in how and where they market crops."

Warren Potter, who farms 10,000 acres in the Wakaw region, complained that because of the Board, "I'm not free to sell my grain where I want to."

But Dennis Roy, a "retiree" who farms his daughter's 1,000 acres while she works in town to pay the bills, said, "You know, Warren, more than once I was very pleased with the price the Wheat Board gave me for my grain."

Lloyd Pletz and Bob Thomas speculated that there was a deliberate plot to drive the family farmer off the land in Saskatchewan. "Lloyd thinks it's in order to settle Native land claims, but I think it's in order to sell water to the U.S. or to get at the crude oil below the land," said Thomas.  
 

Alliance of workers, working farmers

The team brought copies of the Pathfinder book Capitalism's World Disorder by Jack Barnes. This book explains that the crisis facing family farmers is not the result of a plot, but the lawful development of the crisis-ridden capitalist market system that puts profits before human needs. No one bought the book but it generated interest and helped provoke discussion about the need for farmers to build an alliance with workers in Canada and to look for allies among farmers on an international level.

The socialist activists pointed to the experience of the Cuban revolution to explain how an alliance of workers and peasants forged in that country led to a socialist revolution and the formation of a workers' and farmers' government. The farmers were surprised to learn that land, which is owned by the government in Cuba today, cannot be used as collateral. The government provides cheap credit. Farmers work the land in cooperatives or individually, and cannot lose their land as long as they are working it.

We also suggested that workers in the urban centers could be won to supporting the demand of the farmers for immediate government aid, as well as other demands that could help forge unity such as an immediate moratorium on bank foreclosures of family farmers and the cancellation of the debt of Third World countries to the bankers and governments in Canada and the United States. Lifting this debt burden off the backs of millions of farmers and workers in these countries would have a dramatic impact on their ability to survive.

During the discussion Harvey Linnen pointed to the unity of 8,400 nurses in Saskatchewan who defied the NDP government's strike-breaking legislation last springwhen they fought against funding cutbacks to the health-care system as an example for the farmers.

Linnen also pointed to the need for international solidarity among farmers. "I like watching those French farmers on TV. They know how to fight," he said.

He also asked us about what was happening in Quebec. They explained how the Quebecois are oppressed and why they are fighting for independence. "Farmers here and the people in Quebec have a lot in common, we're both fighting for our dignity," Linnen responded.

A comment by farmer Lloyd Pletz captured the fighting spirit evident by the broad resistance on the land in Saskatchewan. "We're not going down without a fight. We have nothing to lose and everything to gain," he said.

During the course of the three-day trip farmers bought three Pathfinder books and one farmer subscribed to the Militant bought one.

Joanne Pritchard is a member of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees. Michel Prairie contributed to this article.  
 
 
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