There’s no need for anyone to get beat up — or beet up — in contract negotiations between Alberta sugar beet growers and Lantic, the company that contracts beet acres and processes the crop.
With that acknowledgement, beet growers and Lantic have signed a memorandum of understanding designed to avoid the vitriol spewed during the last set of contract negotiations and in others of the more distant past.
“The last negotiation was fairly acrimonious and we wanted to sit down and make sure we have kind of a blueprint … of how we’re going to conduct ourselves during negotiations and try to prevent the situation we had last time around,” said ASBG president Arnie Bergen-Henengouwen.
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Negotiations over the 2015 contract put that year’s crop in jeopardy and included threats by Lantic to close the Taber sugar factory and threats by growers to plant outside the contract and circumvent the previous process.
Sugar beet planting typically begins in April but those negotiations extended from February through most of May 2015 before an agreement was reached.
Bergen-Henengouwen said threats are nothing new to the sugar beet contract negotiation process, but both sides want to avoid them in the future.
“By striking that agreement, that memorandum of understanding, we’re hoping to avert any of those tactics,” he said.
The MOU acknowledges that the two sides won’t resort to “empty threats” and that each party has the right to be profitable. Ideally, Bergen-Henengouwen said growers would like to establish a long-term rolling contract.
“That’s the ultimate goal of this thing, which will hopefully … bring more stability to the industry and predictability for growers, processors and all our industry stakeholders.”
