SASKATOON – Ken Beswick will be missed around the Canadian Wheat Board, says a senior official with the Winnipeg-based marketing agency.
“He brought a perspective that we maybe needed in this place, and it certainly was an Alberta perspective,” said Bob Roehle, the board’s director of communications.
He described Beswick as a “creative thinker,” extremely candid, and an articulate spokesperson for change.
And he expressed disappointment that Beswick felt obliged to resign.
“From a corporate point of view we’ve lost something. We’d rather have Ken inside making his points than going outside to make them.”
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Beswick resigned from his job as commissioner last week, citing irreconcilable differences with the board over its policies on pricing feed barley.
But the parting was anything but acrimonious. In a resignation letter distributed to wheat board staff, Beswick praised their professionalism and said the board does not deserve the abuse it often receives from some quarters.
Roehle said while there was obviously a fundamental disagreement between Beswick and the rest of the board over barley pricing, he was liked and respected within the agency. He was very good at farm meetings. His experience as a farmer in southern Alberta gave him credibility with some farmers who would be skeptical of the board, said Roehle.
Emergency basis only
As for the disagreement over barley pricing that led to the resignation, Roehle said the board went as far as it could when it proposed to the federal government’s Grain Marketing Review Panel that it be allowed to buy cash barley on an emergency basis to meet sales commitments.
Beswick argued unsuccessfully within the agency that the board should buy cash barley on a daily basis, saying it was the only way for farmers to get price signals that would accurately reflect the export and domestic markets.
Leave pooling alone
Roehle said that was simply unacceptable to many people within the board, along with the producer advisory committee and a number of farm organizations who say price pooling is untouchable.
“They say the minute you offer a cash price that on any day may be above the pool price, you are fundamentally eroding price pooling and that’s the slippery slope to oblivion for the wheat board.”
Those people say the board should develop a better contracting system to assure itself of feed barley supplies.
Roehle said the issue is now in the hands of the grain panel, which must choose among the status quo, a totally open market, or compromise.
