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 Destruction of Canadian Rural Life courtesy IMF style Canadian Govt policy

AGRIBUSINESS EXAMINER - The term "structural adjustment" is most
commonly used to describe the onerous "free market" programs imposed on
highly-indebted developing nations by the World Bank and International
Monetary Fund as conditions for receiving further loans. But a new
Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives study finds that Canada's
agricultural industry has also been structurally adjusted, with the same
disastrous results that similar programs have inflicted on poor
countries around the world.

Written by Darrin Qualman and Nettie Wiebe, the study - The Structural
Adjustment of Canadian Agriculture - concludes that "two decades of
structural adjustment have devastated farm families and rural
communities." . . . "Many Canadians think that the IMF and World Bank
impose their structural adjustment programs only on debt-ridden Third
World nations. But the Canadian government has restructured agriculture
and rural Canada by using policy tools remarkably similar to those of
the IMF/World Bank. These tools include the WTO, NAFTA, deregulation,
privatization, cuts in government subsidies, increased foreign
investment, and a much greater emphasis on production for export."

The study finds that these policies are almost identical to the main
components of an IMF-style structural adjustment program, and that the
intent is also the same: to accelerate the transfer of wealth from local
farmers to transnational corporations. Each of these policies is
examined, and their detrimental effects on farmers and their communities
starkly detailed. "Structural adjustment programs around the world have
served to concentrate wealth in fewer hands, drive small farmers into
bankruptcy, and force migration from rural areas to the cities. All of
these effects are discernible in Canadian agriculture.

"Between 1981 and 2001, the number of farms in Canada declined from
318,361 to 246,923, a drop of 22%. In just the past five years (1996 to
2001), Canada lost 11% of its farmers. The farm income crisis has
decimated many rural communities. The profits in the food production
system are increasingly going to transnationals with head offices in
distant (and mostly foreign) cities.

http://www.ea1.com/CARP/agbiz/examiner1.html