Ritter is chair of the Canadian Wheat Board board of directors. He farms near Kindersley, Sask.
The rash of recent takeovers that has hit Canada’s resource sector is a sign that investors throughout the world view Canadian companies as strong, stable ventures with a bright future.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is that decisions about the future of Canadian jobs and resources are increasingly being made outside of our borders by directors and chief executive officers who have less of a vested interest in our future as a country.
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While this is a concern in the mining and manufacturing sectors, nowhere is Canadian sovereignty more important to our security and stability than in the most basic of all goods: grain.
On the Prairies, most of the wooden grain elevators that used to bear witness to the existence of countless little towns have given way to about 300 concrete silos, erected as close as possible to railway main lines and designed to handle large volumes of grain on its way to domestic processors or export markets.
The changes to the landscape inside the corporate offices of the western Canadian grain industry have been no less dramatic. While the Prairies were once dominated by producer-owned grain co-operatives like the Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba Pools, that is no longer the case.
The Pools are long gone. In their place are publicly traded conglomerates, privately held companies and multinational grain giants with a hand in every conceivable stage of the food value chain.
Progress? Some may argue that it is. Efficiencies of scale are undeniable.
Transportation logistics should be more streamlined. Capital is available for future expansion and upgrades.
Nevertheless, grain producers such as myself cannot help but be concerned by the overall direction that our industry is taking.
As small businessmen and women operating in a world of multinational giants, both on the input as well as on the output side, how do we maintain some balance with our suppliers and our customers? How do we protect our profit margins and our livelihood from being further reduced as the powerful entities around us try to increase theirs?
It is not enough as grain producers to grow and market the highest quality and safest food in the world. We still have to be able to make money at it. To do so, we need to structure our industry in a way that accommodates the needs of individual primary producers like myself and the very large corporate players who have arisen in the agricultural sector.
Farmer-owned elevator companies were formed in large part as a specifically western Canadian response to this challenge. With their disappearance, it is more important than ever to pay careful attention to those features of the existing system that have been developed to bring balance and fairness to the grain market.
One of those elements is the Canadian Wheat Board with its powers to act as the exclusive agent for all the wheat and barley sold for human consumption or export. A very stringent quality control system anchored by a strong Canadian Grain Commission (CGC) is another.
The CWB, like the Pools, is designed to bring together grain producers’ marketing strength. The idea was that by selling together, grain producers would get better terms, better prices and fairer treatment than if they were dealing individually with multibillion-dollar corporations. It is an unfortunate fact that western Canadian grain producers don’t get the kinds of subsidies that their competitors in Europe and the U.S. get. It is also unfortunate that they face huge freight costs to get their product to market, far more than competing farmers in Australia and in the Black Sea region. The CWB, with its single-desk agent selling powers, is one of the tools that farmers have to overcome those natural disadvantages. The CWB’s commitment to provide western Canadian farmers with flexible pricing and delivery options while maintaining the single desk is, in effect, giving grain producers the best of both worlds: economic power and the ability to manage their own businesses.
What’s more, when private interests alone rule the grain industry, Canada’s ability to regulate what is produced and how it is produced will suffer as well. Right now, we have a grain industry that is, from a food quality and food safety perspective, the envy of the world.
Other countries come here to get the best grain money can buy. While producers themselves deserve a large share of the credit for this international reputation, there is no doubt that our institutions, including the CWB and the CGC, are responsible as well.
Protecting our Canadian sovereignty and our Canadian approach to successfully overcome the challenges we face as a nation is not about protecting vestiges of the past.
If it was, it would be hard to defend, even as a matter of social policy. But when there are specific examples of made-in-Canada approaches that work well, that make economic sense, that earn us international recognition and that enable us to level the playing field with other nations, we would be foolish to toss them aside.
Sometimes, you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.
