Numbers compared | Critics credit bumper crop on the Prairies, despite ag minister’s contention
As grain farmers grumble while railways struggle to move this year’s record prairie crop, agriculture minister Gerry Ritz is touting it all as vindication of the government’s marketing freedom decision.
He bragged at grain industry meeting in Ottawa last week that delivery and export figures for the current crop year are better than the last year of the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly in 2011-12.
And it is not because of higher volumes and a record harvest, he said. It is because farmers can move their grain quickly.
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Rail congestion is a result of more farmer marketing power.
“It’s more access,” Ritz told reporters after a speech to a grain industry symposium sponsored by the Canada Grains Council and Grain Growers of Canada.
“You’re not sitting there waiting for quota, you actually have the ability to move. There’s some stress on the system because the system is much more open than it was.”
In a speech to the grain summit, the agriculture minister made a point of arguing that while critics decried the 2011 end of the CWB single desk, current industry conditions prove their dire predictions wrong.
“Today we are already into the second year of marketing freedom and despite a handful of rumblings from the full-moon crowd, the sky is still up there where it should be.”
Canadian Grain Commission numbers say farmer deliveries of wheat, durum and barley were 7.6 million tonnes to the first week of November.
“That’s well ahead of last year’s pace and up some 30 percent compared to the last year of the single desk.”
Likewise, he said grain exports for the first two months of the crop year to Oct. 1 were 3.2 million tonnes, 14 percent higher than during “the first two months of the final year of the monopoly.”
He said the government is watching rail performance and a 2015 review of the Canada Transportation Act will be a chance for the industry to make its case for tougher performance requirements by the railways. “This year the record crop is testing the system to the max.”
However, Ritz repeatedly made the comparison between the current year and the last year of the CWB monopoly.
“So far this crop year, we’re pushing through more grain than we did under the last year of the single desk,” he told the conference. “In any business, that is called cash flow and it’s not a bad thing.”
The minister made his comments to a friendly crowd at the Ottawa conference. Grain Growers of Canada was a key government ally in ending the single desk and former GGC executive director Richard Phillips is now president of the Canada Grains Council.
However, critics insist that this year’s numbers on deliveries and exporters reflect the crop size and not the marketing structure.
Despite recent high prices, they argue farmers are losing because of the loss of market power the CWB held to access highest-value markets throughout the year.
Ritz also committed last week to continue reform of the Canadian Grain Commission during the last two years of this government’s mandate.
He did not outline the proposed changes but a major missing piece in last year’s changes that reduced mandatory CGC services and increased farmer fee-for-service costs was a change in the current Grain Commission governance structure.
The next reform is expected to be a switch from the current three-commissioner system to a more corporate governance structure with a president/chief executive officer and vice-presidents.
