WINNIPEG – The Canadian Wheat Board broke its tradition of silence on marketing policy last week and entered the debate over its own future.
Chief commissioner Lorne Hehn told a news conference he and other board officials will attend as many farm meetings as possible to ensure farmers know the facts about single agency selling through the wheat board versus a more open marketing system, before they decide on what marketing style they want.
Hehn said detractors of the board’s monopoly are using incomplete and inaccurate information to undermine the organization’s credibility.
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“We have farmers comparing initial wheat payments with spot prices in the United States and they’re wondering why the CWB can’t get them that kind of money,” Hehn said.
“Let’s start comparing apples with apples before we pass judgment on our marketing system.”
The Canadian Wheat Board’s pooling system shares the returns from both subsidized and non-subsidized world markets among all prairie farmers who export wheat and barley. Because of subsidies, world wheat prices vary as much as $160 per tonne.
The U.S. market price is among the 30 percent of world markets which are not affected by export subsidies used by Europeans and Americans to buy market share.
Hehn said it is true prices quoted at U.S. elevators are higher than what Canadian farmers are expected to realize through the CWB pools.
“What is not true is that when the wheat board sells into the U.S. market, that it is only achieving the U.S. elevator price,” Hehn said.
The board captures as much as $20 per tonne more than individual farmers in the U.S. market because it is able to ship high volume, directly to the end-user by rail, officials said.
Hehn said now that there is a cap on exports of wheat and durum to the U.S., “it’s even more critical that every tonne of wheat that we sell to the United States be sold for the maximum revenue or price possible.”
The initiative met with angry response from farmers and organizations favoring a dual market.
Portage la Prairie farmer Curtis Sims said he doesn’t like the idea of the board spending farmer’s money to convince them the board’s monopoly is worth preserving. “I don’t argue with a fully informed debate, but obviously they are a heavily biased party,” he said.
The Western Barley Growers Association and the Western Canadian Wheat Growers Associa-tion also spoke against the board’s self-defence plan.
