WINNIPEG — The one clear message emerging from the post-GATT briefings taking place in the grain industry these days is that the pro-deal rhetoric contained a few mistaken assumptions.
Far from being a deal that offers any short-term promise of making things better, GATT negotiators’ main accomplishment was an agreement not to make things worse.
Prairie farmers were told that a new GATT deal would shift grain production patterns to regions of the world where there is a “natural competitive advantage.”
The assumption was that Europe would cease to be a major world exporter once it stopped paying its farmers high production subsidies.
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That’s unrealistic, Rowan Cherrington, a British grain farmer and a member of that country’s GATT negotiating team, told a grain industry conference here last week.
High subsidies over the past 20 years not only gave European farmers the incentive to learn how to produce cereals, it fueled technological research to back them up. That knowledge and experience won’t disappear.
“Don’t look to Europe to stop growing cereals; it will not happen,” he said.
Britain has two competitive advantages working in its favor — rainfall in excess of 80 centimetres (31 inches) per year, and a deep water port within 160 kilometres of any cereal farmer in the country.
Cherrington spends $6 per tonne getting the grains grown on his farm to an export port — a fraction of the cost most North American farmers must spend.
The way Cherrington sees it, Canadian farmers have only two marketing advantages over him — the ability to produce premium quality and a Canadian Wheat Board to sell it. Even so, “don’t try to compete with us on feed grains,” he warned.
“If we get a GATT deal,” GATT proponents told prairie farmers, there would be no need for the U.S. government to continue blasting away at world grain prices with its Export Enhancement Program.
But Karen Moore Fegley, who was in Winnipeg representing U.S. wheat growers at two conferences last week, said EEP will change — not disappear.
It will become ” a market opening tool or a market promotion tool, or some other tool,” she said.
Producers have a right to feel a little cheated.
“From the very beginning, the negotiations and their outcome was way oversold to you as producers,” she said.
