The bidding for PotashCorp of Saskatchewan has been as exciting as any high pitched bidding for the prize machine on a farm auction sale.
But this high drama has big implications. It reveals key things about our reach into and responsibilities for what comes after us.
Much of the public discussion about the pros and cons of the bid from Australian based BHP Billiton has focused on the immediate economic benefits or shortcomings of the deal.
Is $38.6 billion the right price? How will royalty rates and tax revenues to the Saskatchewan government be affected? Will BHP Billiton locate head offices and high-paid management jobs in the province?
Read Also
Agriculture ministers agree to AgriStability changes
federal government proposed several months ago to increase the compensation rate from 80 to 90 per cent and double the maximum payment from $3 million to $6 million
Will they have an incentive to ramp up production to oversupply demand and thus lower the price of potash?
Or will there be a strategy to lower production, costing jobs, to drive up potash prices?
Farmers whose input costs include chemical fertilizer have a particular interest in the supply and pricing questions, of course. But the money, the players and the stakes in this hostile takeover bid take it well beyond any farmgate.
Because nearly a quarter of all the world’s potash is mined in Saskatchewan, and PotashCorp is the world’s largest single potash producer, millions of people will be affected by the billions of dollars and the corporate decisions that are under consideration. Potash is a strategic resource, not only for the province of Saskatchewan but for many beyond it. There’s a lot on the auction block here.
Here’s the obvious factor that is too seldom fully taken into account: potash is a non-renewable resource.
Taking this obvious truth seriously means that the decisions on potash are not just about the current generation of Saskatchewan or Canadian or even global citizens. Using up this resource takes it away from all future generations.
So it’s not just the many people that are alive today who are affected by how this resource is handled.
Because potash is an important component of food production, decisions about it have implications not only for the economic well-being but also for the possibility of feeding grandchildren, great-great-grandchildren and all those yet to come.
These then become stark decisions about stewardship, our right to use up natural resources to the detriment of our successors and our responsibility for perpetrating hunger.
It’s easy to ignore these truths but that doesn’t make them go away. Taking future people into account deepens the meaning of “strategic” when it comes to non-renewable resources such as potash.
This reframes the debate about sharing the benefits of the resource.
The current talk is mostly about competitive royalty rates, taxation on profits and corporate promises to be generous with their donations to community projects.
But knowing this is a non-renewable resource means that the benefits have to be extended into the distant future.
Those future generations are also beneficiaries.
Nettie Wiebe is a farmer in the Delisle, Sask., region and a professor of Church and Society at St. Andrews College in Saskatoon.
