The Canadian Wheat Board says it’s getting tired of repeatedly having to explain and justify its trading practices to American authorities when it has never been found guilty of any wrongdoing.
“This smacks of harassment,” said CWB spokesperson Deanna Allen. “This is the seventh investigation we have had to endure since 1990 and there has been zero evidence of unfair trading that comes forward.”
The latest study, by the United States government’s General Accounting Office, was done at the request of North Dakota senator Byron Dorgan, a persistent critic of the board’s pricing and trading practices.
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Released last week, it provides an analysis of wheat board operations, government assistance to the CWB, recent changes to the board, the availability of information on CWB pricing and whether there are any trade remedies the U.S. could use against the board.
The report said it’s difficult to assess whether the board’s marketing practices are trade-distorting because so little information is made available about those practices.
“The CWB discloses limited details about its prices for the wheat and barley that it sells to trading partners,” said the report, adding that some U.S. government officials and farmer organizations say the board’s “non-transparent” prices make it hard to judge whether its activities are consistent with international trade agreements.
Dorgan accused the wheat board of “stonewalling” by refusing to open its books to an independent audit review.
“Requests by the GAO for CWB pricing and other operational information were consistently denied by the CWB during the year-long GAO investigation,” he said.
Allen said the board takes the audits and investigations seriously and co-operates as much as it can, given the need to preserve commercial confidentiality.
Enough is enough
But, she said, the board will never give out pricing information.
“Nobody releases information that could jeopardize its commercial business, neither the private traders nor us,” she said. “We’re as transparent as anyone else and as transparent as we have to be. We’ve been audited to death by these guys and been found to be clear in every single audit.”
A spokesperson for wheat board minister Ralph Goodale said this latest GAO report is a relatively innocuous document that fails to provide any evidence of improper activity by the board.
“If they want to keep on doing this and it makes them feel good, fine,” said John Embury. “We’re confident that they will never find anything wrong.”
The U.S. government has made it clear it intends to go after so-called state trading enterprises such as the CWB during the next round of negotiations under the World Trade Organization.
Dorgan asked the GAO to examine whether trade remedies are available for use against the wheat board and other state trading bodies.
The study reported that trade remedies in U.S. law against disruptive or trade-distorting practices, such as dumping, can be used in the same way they are used against private entities. It said while the WTO has recently changed its rules to require more information from state trading enterprises on pricing practices, the U.S. believes it does not go far enough.
