Common Response to 'Finding Common Ground' Expected Within the Next Month
Farmscape for May 28, 2001 (Episode 689) Keystone Agricultural Producers expects Manitoba's agricultural commodity groups to finalize a common response, within the next month, to the Provincial Livestock Stewardship Panel's 'Finding Common Ground' report. The Livestock Stewardship Panel was commissioned by the province to develop policy recommendations for dealing with intensive livestock development in Manitoba. The panel's report, 'Finding Common Ground', makes 40 recommendations for addressing concerns related to intensive livestock development in Manitoba. KAP Vice President Weldon Newton says the hope is to finalize a common response to the report when representatives of the province's agricultural commodity groups meet next week. Clip-Weldon Newton-Keystone Agricultural Producers We've had discussions with all of the livestock commodity groups at this point and I think we're all pretty common on our response. We're widening that out that out now to include the grains commodity groups as well and the discussions that we've had around the proposed draft at this point, everybody has been pretty well in agreement with what is there. It'll probably take a little bit of fine tuning but I think we're seeing a pretty common position come from agriculture in reaction to the report. As you're aware there's 40 recommendations in the report. 'How are we going to handle the land use planning and decision making process?' probably is the key one and 'Can we make it work better than what it is right now?' and secondly, when you get into that, agriculture has to take priority and how do we do that and allow agriculture to continue to grow and survive down the road. Newton says progress is already being made on some of the report's recommendations. He says, once the common response is completed, meetings with the agriculture minister will be set up to find out which recommendations the government intends to adopt and how fast it plans on proceeding. For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.