AgriRecovery in spotlight as floods wash out farmers

The likelihood of the AgriRecovery disaster relief program being triggered for the second time in British Columbia in only a few months is highlighting discussions to improve risk management for Canadian farmers due to climate change.

Although “we’ve shown that this program can react very quickly,” officials have been eyeing ways to “improve the business risk management programs and to make them responsive to the new type of challenges that we are facing,” said federal Agriculture Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau.

“Many of them are coming from changing climate and extreme events, so this is a conversation that we are having already.”

The current five-year, $3 billion Canadian Agricultural Partnership will expire on March 31, 2023. Agricultural ministers hope to sign a partnership agreement for the next five-year policy framework at their annual meeting in Saskatchewan in July 2022.

During a federal, provincial and territorial meeting in Guelph, Ont., they issued a set of priorities and principles Nov. 10 to guide the framework for 2023-28. The Guelph statement includes “enhancing resiliency to anticipate, mitigate and respond to risks, including a robust suite of business risk management programs.”

It also urges that programs should be “timely, equitable and easy to understand.”

Bibeau has said the amount of money for such programs has not been discussed.

B.C. Agriculture Minister Lana Popham said Nov. 19 there was agreement “across the nation that agricultural support needed to involve a climate change lens. And here in B.C., we’ve already been adapting our programs to have faster response times and better customer service in that regard, and so we are well on our way down a path of getting that type of assistance when needed.”

AgriRecovery is one of the first mechanisms that can be put into place following unprecedented flooding, such as that affecting hundreds of B.C. producers, Bibeau said during a tour Nov. 18 of Olds College in Alberta.

The program was implemented in September to help B.C. farmers and ranchers slammed by record-breaking heat waves, drought and wildfires that resulted in the destruction of the village of Lytton on June 30.

The B.C. Ministry of Agriculture said Popham has “spoken to her federal counterparts and we will be looking at an Agri-Recovery package, like we did in the summer with the wildfires, to support farmers through this difficult time.” Bibeau said she was waiting for a formal request from Popham to retrigger the program.

Popham said Nov. 19 all the insurance programs within her ministry “will be looked at to see if we can be able to support the requests and the claims that come in, but farmers are also going to be eligible for disaster relief, which they haven’t been in the past.”