WINNIPEG – Statistics Canada has conceded it should have done more to show how a severe prairie drought and difficult survey conditions muddled its 2002 canola crop estimates.
The federal agency’s phone survey of more than 33,000 farmers for its season-ending report last December resulted in a canola production number that was off by 17 percent. In a typical year, the estimate would have to be revised by only 1.3 percent.
“This has to be one of the biggest revisions we’ve made since I’ve been there,” said Oliver Code, chief of the crops section of Statistics Canada.
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Early in the marketing year, traders sensed there were problems with StatsCan’s call of 3.577 million tonnes of canola.
But it did not officially revise the number to 4.178 million tonnes until Oct. 3 this year, well after the marketing year ended.
The lag caused confusion for domestic and international traders and buyers that use the Winnipeg Commodities Exchange, said Dave Reimann with trading house Benson Quinn-GMS.
“They brush it off (as) a Mickey Mouse market and they go trade somewhere else,” Reimann told Code during a Nov. 5 meeting with analysts.
Code said farmers had difficulty estimating supplies for the surveys because of the drought.
Also, many farmers were still harvesting when surveyors phoned, and there was confusion about how to report unharvested grain.
Farmers were also under extreme stress, making it difficult for surveyors to probe for answers, he said.
“There was some data that we would have normally questioned further, but we did not for compassionate reasons,” Code said.
