REGINA – John Oberg didn’t mince words.
The National Farmers Union member from Forestburg, Alta., took to the microphone during last week’s annual NFU convention to talk about grain transportation.
By the time he sat down, there was no doubt who he blamed for many of the problems facing producers.
“The Western Grain Elevator Association is the enemy of the farmer,” he told the supportive crowd of about 60 fellow NFUers.
In an interview later, Oberg wasn’t backing down.
“I think enemy is a good word,” he said. “I haven’t seen any policy of theirs that really has been for the benefit of farmers. They’re just trying to look after their own needs.”
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He pointed to the WGEA’s standoff against farm organizations and the Canadian Wheat Board during last year’s negotiation of new grain shipping rules, its members’ refusal to participate in wheat board tenders, and its lobbying to license producer car loading sites.
Oberg said he wouldn’t expect the association, which represents the 10 major grain handling firms operating in Western Canada, to be worried about the interests of farmers.
Many of them are under financial pressure to maximize revenue and profits to pay down large debts. One way they do that is by closing elevators, reducing services, raising fees and trying to undermine potential competitors like producer car groups, he said.
“Farmers should know that this organization is going to do whatever they can in their power, lobbying the federal government and Canadian Grain Commission to facilitate legislation that will benefit them and very likely disadvantage farmers in their struggle to market their grain at as low a cost as possible,” Oberg said.
He added that the gulf between grain companies and farmers has gotten wider in recent years as farmer-owned and controlled grain handling co-operatives have metamorphosed into publicly traded firms that are indistinguishable from the big American multinationals.
“Ten years ago it was a much broader-based group of companies collecting and marketing grain,” Oberg said.
“Now they speak with one corporate voice.”
Terry Boehm, chair of the NFU’s transportation committee, said grain companies are only hurting themselves by promoting grain handling and transportation policies that he says hurt individual producers.
If things get bad enough in the farm economy, the production of export grain will start to decline, depriving grain handlers of the export volumes required to turn a profit.
“They are looking after their interests, but I think they’re being shortsighted,” Boehm said.
WGEA executive director Ed Guest rejected the idea that grain companies and farmers are adversaries.
He said the companies know it’s in their interests for grain growers to make money and prosper.
“Without farmers, there are no grain companies,” he said in an interview from the association’s Winnipeg office.
“The better off farmers are, the better chance a grain company has of being solvent.”
The major companies have spent $1.4 billion building more efficient grain handling facilities in recent years, he said, and grain farmers are the main beneficiaries through lower costs, trucking premiums and grade bumps.
“The competition out there for farmers’ business is absolutely fierce,” he said.
“The more money they can return to farmers, the more farmers’ business they’re going to get.”
As for the producer car issue, he said the WGEA wants equal regulatory treatment for companies providing equivalent services.
Boehm said that while many farmers have historically viewed the private grain trade as the enemy, he prefers to think of grain companies as “a necessary evil.”
Farmers have always tried to devise ways to operate outside the system, whether by creating the prairie pools decades ago or building producer car loading facilities now.
