Sacrifice wheat board to cure U.S. trade problem: Esquirol

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Published: August 11, 1994

SASKATOON – Canada could have avoided a cap on wheat sales to the United States, says the Western Canadian Wheat Growers Association.

All it had to do was sacrifice the Canadian Wheat Board.

It’s the board that makes the Americans mad, said association president Hubert Esquirol, so Ottawa should have offered to end the board’s monopoly on sales to the U.S.

“Maybe if we’d done that we could have gotten no (volume) caps,” Esquirol said.

That’s nonsense, say traditional board supporters like the National Farmers Union and Saskatchewan Wheat Pool.

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“I don’t buy that at all,” said pool vice-president Barry Senft, adding that uncontrolled access to the U.S. market by individual farmers and private grain traders would make for even worse trade relations.

Wilf Harder, chair of the board’s producer advisory committee, said much of the anger in the U.S. this past year was triggered by the sight of Canadian farmers trucking wheat across the border and lining up at elevators in North Dakota and Montana.

The board had always been aware of the potential for trouble and was cautious in its sales program in the U.S., he said. That discipline would disappear if the border was thrown open.

“If you think the Americans are mad now, what would happen if we did that?” said Harder.

Even United Grain Growers president Ted Allen, a supporter of an open North American market for barley and wheat, doubts that trade relations would be much different under that system.

“They just don’t like our wheat coming down there,” he said. “Whether it’s board wheat or non-board wheat, I think their attitude would be the same.”

But Esquirol said U.S. farmers he talks to always raise the issue of the wheat board marketing practices.

“One of the recurring demands the Americans have made was that they cannot stomach … the Canadian Wheat Board marketing into their country. A monopoly marketing into their country is just not acceptable.”

Ottawa should have at least put the board’s marketing powers in North America on the negotiating table to see what the response would be, he said, noting the deal exempted non-board Ontario wheat from any volume caps.

“The question we’re asking is ‘how much higher could that cap have been if we had negotiated the board’s authority over sales into the U.S.?’,” said Esquirol.

Manitoba agriculture minister Harry Enns said he agrees the board is the target of U.S. complaints, but opposes ending the board’s monopoly on sales into that country.

“The benefits of the wheat board are far too serious for us to take that kind of attitude … to cause us to change our system,” Enns said.

While federal officials insist that grain industry leaders supported the plan last weekend some of those same leaders were publicly criticizing it later.

Unifarm of Alberta vice-president Ron Leonhardt said Canada “surrendered” by agreeing to limit sales: “The government said they weren’t going to back down to the U.S. and I think it’s time somebody stood up to them.”

National Farmers Union spokesman Don Kelsey said Canada should have stuck to its guns and risked the consequences of a trade war.

“If we believe that we were correct in our analysis that the board did a proper job of selling grain to the U.S. and we were not in violation of any of the trade agreements we have signed, then at some point people have to stand up for what they believe in and say no,” he said.

Senft of Sask Pool didn’t like the agreement either, but directed most of his criticism at the U.S.

“I don’t think the Canadian government had much of a choice,” he said, adding that grain farmers would have been no further ahead with a trade war and other sectors of the economy could have been hurt.

About the author

Adrian Ewins

Saskatoon newsroom

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