Canucks are just too darned nice and polite in the brutal business of the world grain trade.
Foreign buyers of our stuff – people who like our stuff – keep telling me that.
And Canadian ag trade promoters tell me they hear the same things overseas.
Foreign buyers say the Yanks, the Aussies, the Europeans and others are banging down their doors, trying to sell their wheat, vegoil crops, pork, beef, whatever. They say their stuff is the best and that our best customers should buy it instead. (I imagine the Russians play the game a bit differently: Buy our wheat and we’ll throw in a few combat aircraft, or some reconditioned Kalashnikovs. Or vice versa: buy some Sukhois and we’ll give you some crap-quality feed wheat.)
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Fortunately, Canada is renowned for top quality crops and meats. That’s not me, a patriotic Canadian, saying that as an act of brazen BS. That’s me as a patriotic Canadian being pleasantly surprised that we’re actually as good as we claim we are. I mean, I’d expect us to BS a bit about our stuff, as anyone selling anything does.
Well, maybe that’s the problem. We probably don’t BS about our stuff. We maybe even play it down a bit, because that would be very Canadian, wouldn’t it? We as a people find over-aggressiveness and in-you-faceness to be crass and impolite. So we don’t do it.
But our competitors don’t have any problem being crass, in-your-face, aggressive. And that probably gets them some sales, because a percentage of the human race is bizarrely vulnerable to the hard and aggressive sell.
We Canadians certainly market our stuff overseas. The CWB did it for decades. Organizations like Canada Pork International and its beefy sister are active doorknockers overseas. The Canola Council of Canada is always trying to pry foreign doors a bit wider open – as with the expanded access to China for Canadian canola announced this week.
My favorite organization in prairie ag – the Canadian International Grains Institute – does an incredible job of connecting with foreign buyers and users and bringing them here to work closely with our industry, or by going over there to help them using our crops.
And the federal and some provincial governments are actively working away to make things as good as possible for us. A Moroccan milling industry leader yesterday told me that Canada’s ambassador to his country is today visiting with Morocco’s version of CIGI and that he hoped the two nations’ grain and milling industries could become closer.
And federal ag minister Gerry Ritz is pushing for more market access every time he goes somewhere or says anything.
But methinks we need to do much more. Somehow. Not quite sure how. Or what. Or who’s gonna pay for it.
But after I hear the same concern from foreign customers and Canadian ag trade reps, and hear it from multiple members of each group many times, I conclude we’ve got a problem.
And that’s that we’re just too darned Canadian in our restraint and lack of pushiness. And we need to get more crass, more tacky and more aggressive when we’re pushing our stuff.
Because no one else is going to do it, and it’s a crime every time one of our competitors steals a sale from us simply because they were more shameless.
We need to be more in-your-face.
(Hope I didn’t offend anyone!!!!!! Should I tone it down a bit?)
