LONDON, Ont. – Canadian dry bean traders are swapping their exporter hats for their importer hats this year.
A crop wreck in Manitoba has them finding beans on the open market to fulfil contracts with buyers, said Agricore United pulse crop trader Martin Chidwick.
Those who are “woefully short” are taking the rare step of bringing in product from places that are normally net importers of North American beans, like Mexico.
“We’re just humbled by Mother Nature. The events overtook us. I don’t think we could have done any one thing different,” said Chidwick.
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In addition to importing beans, traders are attempting to renegotiate terms with buyers, trying to get them to accept lower quality product or to defer a portion of their purchases until the following crop year.
Delaying sales would have the spin-off effect of creating more demand for bean acres in 2005, but that could be a dangerous strategy, said Manitoba Agriculture pulse crop specialist Bruce Brolley.
“Our rebound in acres is going to be limited not by the growers’ desire to grow it but by the seed supply,” he said.
Brolley estimates only 60 percent of Manitoba’s 200,000 acres of edible beans was combined this fall and a large part of that was of questionable quality, placing serious constraints on the amount of seed available for next year.
Seed suppliers will run out of Envoy, AC Pintoba, Maverick and other popular navy, pinto and black bean varieties grown in Manitoba and North Dakota, which also had a crop wreck.
Brolley surmised producers will be “so stuck for seed” they’ll have to consider bringing in a variety like AC Compass from Ontario, a navy bean that can be grown in Manitoba but hasn’t performed well in the past.
Next spring, growers will have to be extra vigilant in testing their bean seeds for germination, vigour and diseases. They should use seed treatments, he said.
If this year’s bad harvest and next year’s seed concerns aren’t depressing enough, there is also a worrisome development in international bean markets.
Producers might want to keep a watchful eye on Brazil, said Chidwick. With annual production in excess of three million tonnes, the country has overtaken India as the world’s top bean producer.
In an average year most of those beans are consumed domestically, but with vast amounts of new land coming under cultivation, the country is becoming a legitimate exporting threat, seeding more land to high-value specialty beans.
“Brazil is more and more developing as a competitor of ours,” said Chidwick.
In years like this where there are few Canadian beans to export it’s not a problem. In fact, it can be helpful. But in the long term the country poses a looming threat to bean growers as evidenced by how Brazilian producers have taken soybean markets by storm in recent years.
“They’re not small operations so the potential is there for sure,” said Chidwick.
