Marketing, weather, economy | The conference, once organized by the wheat board for 20 years, had an open market flavour
It wasn’t hard to tell that the Canadian Wheat Board didn’t organize this year’s GrainWorld conference.
Some of the speakers and messages seemed to be a polar opposite to the usual theme of the conference, which has been operating for more than 20 years.
Instead of being told that prairie farmers are benefiting from being able to sell high quality wheat for premium prices, speakers said prairie farmers are wasting effort on growing types of wheat for which the world won’t pay a premium.
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“We’re getting our butts kicked because we don’t have to be the best quality in the world,” said Lawrence Yakielashek of international marketer Toepfer.
Some of the speakers were avowed foes of the old monopoly CWB.
Jim Pallister, who farms near Portage la Prairie, Man., compared the new wheat board act, which removed the CWB’s monopoly, with the Homestead Act, which opened up the Prairies to settlement.
“What the federal government has just done with our grain industry is a similar act in nation-building,” he said. “It’s nothing less than the privatization, the return to normal private property, of the entire wheat, durum and barley industry.”
An hour before Pallister was lauded at the conference, federal agriculture minister Gerry Ritz, the killer of the CWB monopoly, gave a celebratory speech, noting the “great victory” in court defending the new CWB legislation, which is “the beginning of a new era.”
Anti-monopoly activist John DePape was scheduled to moderate a panel discussion about marketing the next day.
Yet the basic function of the conference was the same, as new impresario John Duvenaud pointed out at the beginning of the two-day event.
“It’s a good thing to have accurate information,” said Duvenaud, talking about the history of U.S. Department of Agriculture agricultural price outlook conferences and the evolution of this Canadian version.
The CWB picked up the conference that became GrainWorld after Brian Mulroney’s federal Progressive Conservative government dropped it, and Duvenaud has picked it up now that the CWB has dropped it.
Former GrainWorld chair Bruce Burnett of the CWB congratulated Duvenaud on being willing and able to organize the conference.
“It really is a big task,” said Burnett.
“He had a very tight timeline to do this. He stepped up and came through with an excellent program for us.… We all need to take a look at how the impacts of not only the economy, but the weather and other things, are going to influence planting decisions and eventually the crops we produce here in the next year.”
