Loading Events

« All Events

Virtual Event Virtual Event

Food Price Inflation and Farmer Livelihood: The Declining Farmers’ Share

virtual event

Start time by time zone
Noon PDT / 1pm SK, AB / 2pm MB / 3pm EDT / 4pm ADT

Virtual Event Virtual Event

May 22 @ 12:00 pm 1:30 pm PST

Canadian farmers have seen no benefit from rising grocery store prices since 2020. Instead, they are being squeezed by corporate profiteering on all sides. For years, corporate concentration in Canada’s food system has kept farm gate prices chronically low, while retail prices rise steadily for consumers. Farmers are forced to accept prices that are decided by large, multinational commodity traders and processors. At the same time, they face prohibitively high costs for inputs from oligopolistic suppliers.

The system is stacked against farmers and consumers alike. It’s time to confront corporate power in the food system. Join the NFU on May 22nd at 3PM EST for a panel webinar on the farmers’ share of food prices and an examination of how corporate concentration in the Canadian food system harms both farmers and consumers featuring Keldon Bester of the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project; Alex Purdye former Broadbent Institute Fellow; and Alyssa Gerhardt, PhD student at Dalhousie University.

Alyssa Gerhardt is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University. She specializes in economic sociology, studying personal debt in Atlantic Canada using a mixed-method approach. Alyssa has been involved in several different projects with the Rural Futures Research Centre at Dalhousie, including a regional study on work, income, and community. Recently she co-authored Canada’s Food Price Report 2021, a national report that forecasts food prices and examines food trends as well as a study of farmers market food prices to better understand alternative food systems.

Keldon Bester is the Executive Director of CAMP, and a Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI). Keldon has worked as a Special Advisor at the Competition Bureau, as a Fellow at the Open Markets Institute, and as a consultant across sectors in Canada.

Alex Purdye is a research analyst and a master’s student at Carleton University’s Institute of Political Economy. His research focuses include monetary theory, currency internationalization, classical political economy, and the history of economic thought.