VICTORIA – There’s a new “coalition of the willing” getting ready to take on the world.
Its enemies are soybean and palm oils and the word rapeseed.
“There is an opportunity to increase the global market share held by canola by working together, and while we still clearly have issues to discuss in how we want to do this and what might be the areas of common focus, we do have some common interests and we can share those,” Rosemary Richards, executive director of the Australian Oilseeds Federation, told the Canola Council of Canada annual convention.
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Canola industry groups from Canada, the United States and Australia have agreed to work together to boost canola’s place in the world, even though the three countries are often competitors. While canola may be a major crop in Australia and Canada, it is not a major crop in most other countries and it is dwarfed in the vegetable oil market by competitors.
Saskatchewan farmer and Canola Council of Canada vice-chair Stewart Gilroy said canola needs to be branded in the world market as a high quality, healthy edible oil. Doing so will help producers in all three countries.
A key struggle, he said, is eliminating the word rapeseed from the world’s vocabulary. Europeans still use the term.
“We’d like to make canola the standard,” said Gilroy. That includes having the word canola used in international grain industry communications and converting the Europeans to it before they begin producing exportable surpluses.
“We don’t need confusion,” said Gilroy.
