The Saskatchewan Trade and Export Partnership says the province’s agriculture sector has an Achilles’ heel.
According to STEP, the logistics of getting crops to overseas markets is a quagmire that is only going to get worse.
Ships anchored at the Port of Vancouver wait an average 17 days before being loaded, STEP president Lionel LaBelle told delegates attending Breadbasket 2.0, a summit organized by Canada’s Public Policy Forum.
As well, 70 percent of the containers that leave the province loaded with agricultural commodities do not make the boat they’re supposed to sail on.
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“We’ve got a problem and it’s going to get worse,” LaBelle said during a session on impediments to agriculture.
Saskatchewan’s oil and gas sector is consuming an ever-increasing share of railway resources, and the province’s potash industry is poised to grow threefold in the coming years.
It doesn’t bode well for shippers of agricultural products because it’s not the Canpotex Ltd. potash ships that wait in Vancouver’s English Bay for 17 days. It’s the vessels waiting to be loaded with agricultural products.
LaBelle was asked if new federal shippers’ rights legislation will improve the situation.
“When you talk about shippers’ rights, the question is, whose rights?” he said.
He wonders how a farmer-owned inland grain terminal will fare compared to a shipper such as Canpotex, which exports seven to 10 million tonnes of potash a year.
LaBelle is also concerned about the state of Canada’s ports, which he said don’t stack up to state-of-the-art facilities such as the Port of Shanghai.
“Quite frankly, they make Vancouver look like a kids’ game. It’s just not very serious,” he said.
STEP recently organized a demonstration of Saskatchewan agricultural machinery at a fair in Jiangsu, China. Three containers of equipment had to leave Saskatoon on rail 75 days before the conference.
Part of the agreement was that Jiangsu would reciprocate by sending Chinese agricultural equipment to the Farm Progress Show in Regina.
“They left (Jiangsu) 21 days ago and now that container is in Regina,” said LaBelle.
He said it’s unacceptable that it takes more than three times as long for Canadian goods to reach China than it does the other way around.
