WETASKIWIN, Alta. – One thing was clear from a debate two weeks ago on dual marketing versus single-desk selling: Producers do not have an easy decision in the upcoming barley marketing plebiscite.
“Now I don’t know if I know enough to vote,” said one agrologist after presentations by pro-Canadian Wheat Board monopoly and anti-monopoly experts.
The Alberta Institute of Agrologists’ Edmonton and Red Deer branches organized the meeting to sketch the barley marketing situation.
Harvey Brooks, who used to head the Canadian Wheat Board’s corporate policy division, set forth the pro-monopoly position, while Ken Stickland, a grain marketing consultant who provided analyses for the Western Grain Marketing Panel, laid out the argument for a grain market with less board control.
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Brooks argued farmers would suffer if the monopoly was broken. He said the wheat board has been able to extract top prices for malting barley and for feed barley exports. If competition was allowed into the system, the “law of one price” would rule, and Canadian grain companies would inevitably drag prices for Canadian export feed barley well below where they could be.
Solve without sacrifice
He said the key issue is “can you solve the problem without sacrificing the malting barley premium?”
And he said the wheat board couldn’t survive in competition with other grain companies, because it would essentially be a grain company without facilities.
Stickland said the board and producers “could take a bit of a leap of faith and treat malting and feed barley differently.”
The board has done a good job of selling malting barley, but its activities have depressed Canadian feed wheat prices, he said. Gains in malting barley sales are often offset by the effect on prairie barley prices.
He said the board should concentrate on malting barley sales, and leave feed barley to the private sector. This would be a good route to take, because not only would it allow the board do what it does well and the private sector to do what it excels at, but it would solve a potential geographic problem.
He said the biggest malting barley producers are in the central and northern portions of the Saskat-
chewan grain belt, while most feed barley production takes place in southern Alberta. The present system tends to send more benefits to Saskatchewan malting barley producers at the expense of Alberta feed producers.
Open up feed barley
Keeping the monopoly would perpetuate that, Stickland said. Allowing the board to continue its monopoly in malting barley but allowing the private sector to take over feed barley would bring more money to farmers and avoid the problems of benefitting one region at the expense of another, Stickland said.
“Maybe you could have both sides happy,” he said. But he added that the all-in or all-out vote producers will face won’t allow them the choice that would help them most.
At the end of the debate both Brooks and Stickland agreed the board has done a poor job of communicating with producers.
Brooks said the board used to feel it couldn’t justify spending money on sending out information that opponents might call propaganda. He said the board is now trying to spend more time informing farmers about how it operates, but two years of increased communication is not enough to bury years of poor interaction.
