An enormous structure looms over the farmers who farm the fields of Western Canada, the millions of tonnes of grain they grow, and the millions of people around the world who depend on their crops.
That structure consists of companies, ports, regulations, governments, money, power and politics, but it’s something farmers can usually only peer at from a distance, like Franz Kafka’s castle, or through a grimy window, like this newspaper’s coverage, or in tiny glimpses, in each farmer’s personal experience with the grain industry.
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The just-published memoir of a long-time, senior player within Canada’s grain industry throws open the gates and opens the windows of that agricultural castle, offering a detailed, extensive, multi-decade personal account of many of the most important and contentious issues and decisions that have affected farmers since the end of the 1960s.
Inside the Global Grain Market is written by Dennis Stephens, who operated the Canada Grains Council from 2000-13, was secretary of the International Grain Trade Coalition from 2002-13, an assistant deputy minister with Agriculture Canada from 1988-95, and executive director of the Canadian International Grains Institute during his 1972-89 career there.
Stephens offers much insight into the way many of the issues confronting farmers and the grain trade were dealt with on the inside, among senior players hidden from public view:
The unravelling of the Crow transportation subsidies and the subsequent concrete elevator building boom, the demise of the co-operative elevator companies and the consolidation of the grain industry.
A detailed insider look into how the Triffid flax crisis and controversy rocked Canada’s flax industry and the much larger vexations of the low-level-presence issue that has bedevilled the entire planet’s grain and food trade industries.
Insights into how Ag Canada operated in his time there, with the Byzantine relations between branches, departments and politicians affecting what and how policies arose and became enshrined or failed and faded.
It’s an enormous book, at more than 500 pages, and it touches on so much that has affected and still affects farmers.
I found it fascinating to dip into many of the sections touching on subjects I have covered for this paper. I found topics like the attempts to keep the Port of Churchill in northern Manitoba operating fascinating, as well as the post-CWB monopoly jockeying-for-position politics among grain industry organizations.
It’s a set of memoirs, not a historical account, and it is designed for readers to jump in and out of any area, which is what I have done.
Stephens, who I recall from his days at the Canada Grains Council, writes that he composed this book over many years as a way to preserve accounts of his professional and personal life that might interest his grandchildren and others who would be interested in knowing something about the areas in which he operated.
For any farmer wanting an insider take on many of the industry and government issues that have affected them since most of us were young, this is quite the resource and worth checking out. It is available on Amazon.
For me, the most pleasant surprise of Inside the Global Grain Market is Stephens’ account of his time as an agricultural journalist in the 1960s. Stephens began as a copy boy at the Winnipeg Tribune, became the newspaper’s ag reporter because he knew something about horses (the editor, who spotted straw on his pant leg one morning, told him nobody else at the paper knew anything about ag, so he was getting the beat), and ended up at the Globe and Mail following the publication of a significant story on Canada’s grain industry. That career in journalism ended when he jumped at a job offer with Federal Grain.
So much has changed in Canada’s grain industry in the almost 28 years since I arrived at this newspaper. It can be hard to step back and get perspective on just how much has changed.
Stephens’ book offers one personal perspective on the renovations, additions, demolitions and other alterations to the castle that looms above farmers. It’s not light holiday reading, but if one wants to climb up and look down from above the castle to the farming world below, this book offers an unparalleled view.
