It was a classic case of good news and bad news for the port of Churchill in 2009.
On the positive side, the northern Manitoba port handled 529,000 tonnes of Canadian Wheat Board grain during its roughly three-month shipping season.
That’s the second-highest volume since 1977 and well above the 10-year average of 438,000 tonnes.
On the negative side, there were no exports of non-CWB grains, there were no imports of fertilizer as there had been the previous two years and there was no domestic shipment of wheat to Halifax.
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David Przednowek, the CWB’s manager of ocean freight and terminal operations, said the CWB was pleased with the volume of export shipments given the late start to the shipping season.
“The start of the season was a bit of challenge because of the cool spring and summer and the resulting ice delays in July and early August,” he said.
The first grain vessel didn’t arrive at the port until Aug. 11, one of the latest starts in recent memory, according to port officials. The last vessel left the port on Oct. 27.
Bill Drew, executive director of the Churchill Gateway Development Corporation, said he was pleased with the board’s program, but thinks the season could have started a couple of weeks earlier.
A passenger vessel arrived on July 21, he said, so there’s no reason bulk vessels couldn’t have come in sooner.
“If we’d started a week or two earlier we could have moved another hundred thousand tonnes,” he said.
Drew said the concern about ice conditions on the part of vessel owners, operators and insurers is as much perception as reality.
However, Przednowek said vessel operators are bound by contracts that restrict where vessels can go at certain times of the year.
“There are always ice issues in northern ports, whether it’s Churchill or the Baltic Sea or Thunder Bay,” he said.
“If the contract says you can’t go in before Aug. 1, even if it’s ice-free July 25 you’re out of luck.”
Przednowek said icebreakers would be helpful but chartering an icebreaker for several weeks would be expensive. He added the board is always looking to maximize shipments through Churchill because of the cost savings that can be achieved versus shipping from Thunder Bay through the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Seaway system.
“That means more money going into the farmers’ pockets and that’s what we want,” he said.
The key to shipping more through the northern port is a longer shipping season, he added, and that’s unpredictable from one year to the next.
“It’s always subject to ice in the spring,” he said. “It boils down to the weather and there’s not much you can do about that.”
As for the things that didn’t happen at Churchill this year, Drew said there were no fertilizer imports because lower fertilizer prices in Canada made imports from Russia or Europe uneconomical.
He said efforts were made to arrange exports of non-board grains, but a variety of factors, including a late growing season, unfavorable market conditions and a preference by private grain companies to use their own terminal facilities at other ports, prevented that from happening.
As for the shipment of wheat to domestic buyers in Halifax, a number of logistical issues, including unloading capacity at the east coast port, need to be addressed before that can resume.
