The series of U.S. attacks on the Canadian Wheat Board doesn’t reflect the views of grassroots American farmers, says a U.S. farm organization official.
Rather, the trade challenges and political attacks are driven by U.S. grain merchants eager to gain greater access to Canadian wheat markets.
“The pressure is coming mainly from the multinationals, who want to destroy the Canadian Wheat Board,” said Kelly Shockman, a North Dakota farmer and director of the National Farmers Organization.
The countervail duty recently imposed on Canadian wheat and durum shipments to the United States, the anti-dumping case now under investigation and a World Trade Organization challenge against the wheat board were all initiated by the North Dakota Wheat Commission and the U.S. Durum Growers Association.
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Both organizations are producer groups funded by farmers through a mandatory checkoff on wheat and durum sales.
But Shockman said that’s doesn’t mean the impetus for the challenges is coming from the average wheat grower.
“Those organizations are pushing the suit, but they’re being pushed by the multinationals,” he said. “This is not coming from the grassroots farmer.”
He said giant companies such as Cargill, ConAgra and Archer Daniels Midland would love to see the board disappear so they could take over marketing the Canadian wheat crop.
“They can’t do what they want to do in Canada with the wheat board there,” Shockman said.
CWB chair Ken Ritter has expressed similar sentiments about the true motivation for the trade challenges.
“It would certainly appear that American-owned grain companies have a financial interest in seeing the existing Canadian system damaged,” he said in a recent interview.
He acknowledged he has no proof that multinational grain firms are behind the trade cases, but said it’s obvious, based on an assessment of who stands to gain from weakening or eliminating the board.
The end of the board wouldn’t mean an end to Canadian wheat sales to the U.S., which is what growers south of the border object to.
But it would mean opportunities for U.S. multinationals to extract higher profits if they took over the marketing of Western Canada’s wheat crop to foreign buyers.
Shockman said many U.S. farmers look at the CWB with envy, seeing it as a farmer-controlled organization that can compete head on with the multinationals and put more money into farmers’ pockets.
The NFO tries to do the same thing in the U.S. with a variety of farm commodities.
It’s a non-profit voluntary organization that engages in “block marketing” of dairy, meat and grain on behalf of its farmer members, similar to the board’s single desk selling of wheat and barley.
The idea behind the organization, which has been around since 1955, is that farmers can exert more leverage in the marketplace and negotiate better prices and other terms by pooling their products and selling in large volumes.
“Individual farmers just don’t have a chance against the multinationals,” Shockman said. “They have to band together.”
A delegation of NFO officials recently spent a week talking with farm and grain industry organizations in Saskatchewan about the potential for joint marketing efforts.
The visit was also intended to make the point that Canadian and U.S. farmers face common problems and should work together.
