SASKATOON – Back on Jan. 10, Kent Charteris travelled 50 kilometres from his farm at Kerrobert, Sask. to a Western Grain Marketing Panel meeting at Kindersley.
He left the meeting three hours later satisfied that farmers had delivered a strong message supporting the Canadian Wheat Board’s export monopoly.
So he was more than a little surprised last week to learn from the panel’s report that one of the “key themes” expressed at the Kindersley meeting was the need to establish dual marketing.
“That’s not the meeting I was at,” Charteris said in an interview from his farm. “We had 80 to 90 percent in strong support of the CWB and a couple of tables that couldn’t come to a consensus.”
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The panel’s report did note that the Kindersley meeting identified single-desk selling as one of the strengths of the current marketing system, but not for the future.
Ken Ritter, who was at the same meeting, was equally taken aback by the panel report’s description of dual marketing as a key theme for the future grain marketing system.
“The tenor of the meeting wasn’t to establish dual marketing,” he said from his farm at Major, Sask. “Obviously there were certain individuals who were supportive of the dual market system, but they certainly weren’t in the majority.”
A news report in the Jan. 18 issue of The Western Producer stated that nine of the 12 discussion tables reported a consensus in favor of single-desk selling, with three reporting a mixture of views. None reported a consensus in favor of dual marketing.
In an interview published at that time, Charteris said he was skeptical about the consultation process and worried aloud that the government had its own agenda and would ignore what farmers said.
Now he fears he may have been right: “I guess my fears at that time are coming to be true because that certainly isn’t the way I would have read that meeting,” he said last week.
A Western Producer report on the Jan. 23 meeting in Swift Current said “all but a handful” of 300 farmers in attendance voted in favor of the board remaining the single-desk seller of their wheat and barley.
But again, the panel report identified the need to establish dual marketing as a key theme raised at the Swift Current meeting. The report did not identify any general support for single-desk selling at the meeting.
The panel held 15 so-called town hall meetings across the Prairies in January, run by the consulting company KPMG. Farmers were divided into discussion groups and asked to identify strengths and weaknesses in the current marketing system and identify needed changes.
Less bureaucracy wanted
In a summary of the results of those meetings, contained in the panel report released last week, the most commonly mentioned change needed in the marketing system was for a more accountable and less bureaucratic CWB. Many farmers wanted to see dual marketing of wheat and barley but many also wanted to retain single-desk selling or extend it to other crops.
Panel member Wally Madill said panelists were comfortable with the accuracy of the reports from the town hall meetings and said the views expressed by farmers were very important in the panel’s deliberations.
“We relied on and used a lot of the information received in those meetings,” he said. “That was valuable to the panel and we paid a lot of attention to it.”
