Your reading list

A Canada-U.S. wheat alliance?

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Published: August 25, 1994

With friends like this, who needs enemies? U.S. senator Byron Dorgan, one of the politicians who demanded tough measures against Canadian wheat in order to please his North Dakota constituents, now wants to ally with Canada in wheat sales.

In a little-noticed amendment tacked on to a July appropriations bill, Dorgan directed the U.S. department of agriculture to investigate the potential of a joint Canada-U.S. marketing system.

“Together, U.S. and Canadian farmers could harness a vast amount of market power in worldwide wheat export markets,” Dorgan said in a news release. “And yet, under the marketing systems in each country, we try to undersell each other in foreign markets. That means that farmers from both countries are receiving less for their grain than they should.”

Read Also

A ripe field of wheat stands ready to be harvested against a dark and cloudy sky in the background.

Late season rainfall creates concern about Prairie crop quality

Praying for rain is being replaced with the hope that rain can stop for harvest. Rainfall in July and early August has been much greater than normal.

That’s a strange idea to come from a politician who was willing to violate every principle of a free-trade treaty in order to appease his uninformed voters. It is also strange for that proposal to come from the representative of a country that is still attacking Canada’s overseas markets with blatantly unfair export subsidies on grain.

The ironic thing is that he’s quite right. As two grain-exporting nations united economically by a free-trade treaty, Canada and the United States should be co-operating in wheat sales. There should be a North American Wheat Board.

The trouble is that the Americans have consistently shown themselves to be far too parochial and blinkered to comprehend how Canada’s wheat board operates, or why it is sometimes justifiable to place restrictions on the marketing freedom of a minority in order to ensure that everyone benefits. Misinformation and special-interest paranoia (or greed) would cripple any attempt to set up such a transnational marketing agency.

Or, to put it another way, the only way Canada and the United States could have an integrated wheat marketing system would be if Canada abandoned every institution that has served its farmers well, and if wheat exports from across the continent were left to the control of profiteering multinationals and USDA subsidy-slinging bureaucrats.

Thanks, Mr. Dorgan, but no thanks.

Perhaps next century, if the United States first grows up sufficiently to recognize the value of universal collective action in fundamental human needs like health care, then the two countries might be able to discuss something more sophisticated, such as enabling farmers to collectively market their grain and maximize their returns from those sales. Until then, Canada will continue to enjoy its advantage.

About the author

Garry Fairbairn

Western Producer

explore

Stories from our other publications