Less than a year after prairie farmers voted to retain the Canadian Wheat Board as the sole exporter of barley, a group of barley growers has renewed its campaign to break the board’s monopoly.
Western Barley Growers Association president Buck Spencer made his pitch to wheat board minister Ralph Goodale at a meeting in Regina last week.
“For the betterment of the board and of everybody concerned and the betterment of Canada, we really need to look at removing barley from the board,” Spencer said in an interview before the Jan. 21 meeting.
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The final straw, he said, was the recent revelation that several export cargoes of feed barley had been rejected by customers after deer feces were found in them.
The incident has hurt Canada’s reputation as a supplier of quality grain and the damage will spill over to wheat as well, he said.
“If Goodale doesn’t deal with the barley issue soon, it’s going to destroy Canada’s reputation,” he said.
Goodale said he is reluctant to intervene given that farmers voted 63 percent in favor of board marketing just 11 months ago.
“It might appear to be a bit preemptory on my part to simply ignore the result of the vote and proceed to move on what would appear at the moment to be a minority point of view,” he said in an interview.
And he used the opportunity to make a pitch for Bill C-4, the government’s wheat board reform legislation, which he said would provide groups like the barley growers association with a formal process they could use to try to change the board’s marketing authority.
Spencer said although barley exports make up a small percentage of the board’s export program, they account for 50 to 60 percent of the marketing and transportation problems the industry has to deal with.
“So it is affecting our ability to market wheat throughout the world,” he said.
Spencer said he wasn’t blaming the wheat board for the presence of deer feces in the shipments, but added if the grain had been handled by a private exporter, it wouldn’t have the same serious consequences.
“If Cargill had made the trade to Japan instead of the board it would have been no big deal,” he said.
The Japanese buyer would have sorted it out quietly with the private exporter and it would not have made the newspapers, he said.
But because the board is seen as an agent of the government, it blackens Canada’s reputation, not only for barley but for wheat.
“It’s not the board’s fault, but it gets caught up in the whole mess,” said Spencer.
