Nettie Wiebe hates the word stakeholders.
It’s a buzz-word much loved by bureaucrats and industry leaders, who use it as an all-inclusive term to describe everyone involved in agriculture, from farmers to grain buyers to shippers to food processors
But for National Farmers Union president Wiebe, it’s a dangerous word.
“When you use that kind of language, it turns out that those who have a bigger stake … get to make bigger decisions,” she said in an interview after speaking to the opening session of the NFU’s annual convention.
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It reflects an attitude that those with more money and more economic clout should have a bigger say in issues affecting their industry.
And it manifests itself in ideas like giving bigger farmers more votes for the Canadian Wheat Board’s new board of directors or denying small pig farmers a chance to vote on how hogs should be marketed.
That, says Wiebe, is anti-democratic.
“I’m appalled by that,” she said. “If you’re going to organize your economy so that everything is scripted according to who has the most economic power, then we’re back to 300 years ago when only those who held property could vote and those without property had no vote.”
In her speech to about 80 delegates attending the convention, Wiebe said she was told by Saskatchewan agriculture minster Eric Upshall that it wouldn’t have been fair to have a vote on the future of single-desk selling of hogs because all small producers would vote against it and that would be against the interests of big producers who want to expand.
She said those who are in the vast majority are being told to act responsibly and cede control over their livelihood and their future to the big stakeholders.
Loss of power
“We are moving to a place here where the pigs vote,” she said. “This is a fundamental undermining of what we think of as democratic control and democratic government.”
Wiebe said later that the same erosion of democratic ideals is evident in so-called new generation co-operatives, which trade shares on public stock markets.
“Shareholders vote by shares and if you’ve got a million shares you have more weight than if you have three,” she said, adding that’s a long way removed from the one-person, one-vote philosophy on which co-operatives were originally based. “That’s clearly not a democracy.”
