Expanding role | Wheat board considers broadening its product line
The Canadian Wheat Board has signaled its intention to start marketing non-board grain in China.
Speaking to reporters at the end of a trade mission to the Asian country, CWB president Ian White said he met with officials from the China National Cereals, Oils and Foodstuffs Corp. (COFCO) to assure them that Canada will be exporting the same quality of wheat and barley in the post single desk environment.
He also explored the potential of the wheat board broadening the product line it offers to COFCO, which is China’s largest grain importer.
Read Also
Farm Credit Canada extends support for canola producers
Farm Credit Canada has extended its Trade Disruption Customer Support program to canola producers.
“We’re actually looking at an expanded role in the Chinese market for the Canadian Wheat Board through our office in Beijing,” said White.
“It does open up a lot more opportunities for the Canadian Wheat Board to trade the grains that it has been trading but also other grains.”
White was unavailable to expand on those comments, but he has said in the past that the board intends to start buying canola later this year, possibly followed by peas.
John De Pape, who publishes the CWB Monitor online commentary, said it makes sense for the wheat board to expand the portfolio of crops it handles.
“Often freight logistics support what they call combos, where you have multiple commodities on one vessel,” he said. “We used to call them grocery vessels, where you’d have upwards of four or five different commodities on one vessel.”
De Pape doesn’t know what crops the wheat board is considering selling to COFCO, but federal agriculture minister Gerry Ritz may have offered a hint during the conference call from China.
He told reporters COFCO was excited to continue working with the wheat board.
“They’re also excited about starting to move into some of the pulses and so on that they hadn’t been doing before,” he said.
Canada hopes to do more pulse-related business overseas in the wake of the federal government signing a memorandum of understanding with China supporting expanded trade in agricultural goods between the two countries.
“The government has shown initiative in signing this MOU and is raising the profile of Canada’s agricultural sector as an important source of agri-food products for China’s growing food manufacturing sector,” said Peter Watts, director of market innovation with Pulse Canada.
China is Canada’s second largest market for pulses, accounting for nearly 600,000 tonnes of exports worth $250 million in 2011.
