SASKATOON – Nineteen years of selling prairie farmers’ grain have convinced Forrest Hetland of one thing: It would be a big mistake to end the Canadian Wheat Board’s export monopoly.
Whenever he sat across the negotiating table from foreign grain buyers, there was always one thing both he and the customer knew. If they wanted to buy Canadian grain, they were going to have to buy it from him.
That has always been a “tremendous advantage”, he said, not only for him as a salesman, but for the prairie farmers whose grain he was selling.
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“If you have another five guys sitting outside selling the same product, somebody’s going to sell at a lower price,” he said. “If you’re the only seller of a product, you’re in a hell of a lot better position.”
Board under attack
Last week Hetland was in his office on the seventh floor of the wheat board building in downtown Winnipeg, cleaning out his desk, going through his papers and throwing away “hundreds and hundreds” of business cards he accumulated during his travels. The 70-year-old assistant chief commissioner announced just after Christmas that he will retire from the board on Jan. 16.
He leaves at a time when the board’s status as the single desk seller of export wheat and barley is under vociferous attack from some farmers who think they can make more money selling on their own to the United States or abroad.
Despite those pressures, Hetland, an unabashed board booster, said he thinks the selling agency will be around for many years because the more farmers think about it, the more they’ll come to appreciate the benefits of the current system.
“A dual market would work well for maybe a few farmers, but when you start thinking about total Western Canada, there’s no doubt that for the majority of farmers single desk selling is by far the best.”
Perhaps the most telling indication of how good a job the board does selling grain on farmers’ behalf is the fact that wheat growers, farm-state politicians and grain bureaucrats in the United States have made no secret of their desire to see the board either eliminated or emasculated, he said.
“If I was an American, I’d like to get rid of the damn wheat board too,” Hetland said with a laugh.
Hetland holds the Americans responsible for most of the financial woes faced by Canadian prairie grain growers in recent years. Their subsidies under the Export Enhancement Program regularly took $30 to $40 a tonne out of Canadian farmers’ pockets.
“If they were giving a $40 bonus and we wanted to sell into that market, we had to do something equivalent,” he said.
But the board’s ability as a single desk seller to price grain differently in different markets and to guarantee consistent quality to customers over a long term period stood it in good stead.
“The EEP hurt us in the price, but we haven’t lost any of our market share,” he said.
Hetland said he always loved to make a deal and that’s what attracted him to the board in the first place.
Hetland, who took up residence in the board’s offices on Jan. 1, 1976, has seen a lot of changes in the world grain market in the last 19 years.
But, he said, the basics of his job have remained the same – know your customer, know your competition and have a good product to sell. Nobody in the world does those three things better than the wheat board, he said.
