WINNIPEG – The voice of the three prairie wheat pools will be a little quieter in the future, the chair of Prairie Pools Inc. said here last week.
Ray Howe told delegates attending the Manitoba Pool Elevators annual meeting that PPI has scaled down its profile and its staff, returning the job of speaking out on behalf of prairie farmers to the individual pools.
“It is just a recognition that the needs of our membership are sometimes different and that we may need to speak independently sometimes or sometimes not at all,” he said.
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PPI will serve as a conduit of policy information from Ottawa to the provincial organizations and pursue “quiet consultation” when it can reach a consensus, he said.
Howe said PPI directors have realized their original vision of a unified voice on behalf of all pool members on the Prairies was unrealistic given the political and regional differences.
It became clear in recent years, particularly on issues such as grain transportation, that the pools would not always agree. He said other events interfered as well.
For the past eight years, PPI has been dealing with hostile governments. PPI, which represents more than 100,000 Prairie farmers, would get the same hearing from politicians as organizations representing a fraction of that number.
“When we started prairie pools in the mid-1980s, our vision was that we were going to be able to put these three organizations together commercially and politically,” he said.
“Politically we moved a long way. Commercially we didn’t go near as far, and that’s probably the reason why we weren’t successful,” Howe said.
