VANCOUVER – Thumbing through the minutes of a decade’s worth of Pulse Canada meetings, Greg Cherewyk saw the same issue cropping up time and time again.
Transportation problems have been plaguing the special crops sector since its inception.
There have been previous attempts to resolve the myriad logistical challenges facing shippers but without dedicated staff and a proper budget to tackle the issue, those efforts fell short.
“It always hit stumbling blocks that nobody was willing to push past,” said Cherewyk, director of transportation with Pulse Canada.
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The problems have not gone away. They have been magnified by the tremendous growth of the special crops sector, which will account for an estimated 6.8 million acres of crop land in 2007.
“We’ve been talking about it long enough. Now it’s time to act,” said Cherewyk.
This week in Vancouver, Pulse Canada was to launch a transportation strategy designed to get on top of the lingering problem once and for all.
The situation has reached the boiling point for some shippers after the 2006-07 marketing campaign. They have a hard time believing they will ever be on the receiving end of better service from the railways.
“How do you build trust up after you’ve just gone through a year like we have had this past year, where they’ve cost us as an industry and as a company an incalculable number of dollars,” said Greg Simpson, president of Simpson Seeds Inc., one of the largest pulse crop shippers on the Prairies.
There were times when his Moose Jaw, Sask., company went four weeks without receiving any hopper cars, which put Simpson Seeds 4,000 tonnes behind schedule in its shipping program.
“We’ve turned away incredible business in a year when India is short millions of tonnes of product,” said an irate Simpson.
A report by Quorum Corp., Canada’s official grain monitor, identified 50 constraints facing special crops shippers, but Cherewyk said the problems can be reduced to two major challenges.
The first is the lack of timely access to equipment such as box cars, hopper cars, intermodel units and marine containers. That category includes issues such as the unfair allocation of equipment and dealing with cars that are unfit for transporting food items.
The second major challenge is how to overcome the inconsistent and unreliable service from rail carriers.
Complicating matters are the many labour disruptions affecting truckers, railway operators and port workers.
Cherewyk said the special crops industry is particularly susceptible to such actions. For instance, while many shippers hardly noticed the recent strike involving 3,200 track maintenance workers at Canadian Pacific Railway, truckers attempting to pick up special crops containers were held up by picket lines at rail yards, leading to missed vessels.
Cherewyk plans to launch the consultation part of the two-year transportation strategy at this week’s convention. He will interview the railways, shipping lines, port authorities, freight forwarders, governments, transloaders and shippers in the mining and forestry sectors.
By the end of August, the consultation phase will be complete and the data collection phase will begin. Pulse Canada will try to determine how much product is moving by what mode of transport at what time of the year through what corridors to what destinations.
The end goal is to develop forecasting models so that everybody in the system has a better idea of the industry’s transportation needs, which should result in improved access to equipment and better service.
Pulse Canada has requested $600,000 in federal funding for the two-year program ending March 31, 2009, and plans to augment that with a $220,000 commitment from industry in terms of time and money. The group is still awaiting word from Ottawa.
Simpson said the strategy is a step in the right direction but he thinks more drastic action may be required.
“At this point in time (the railways) are big enough and feel that they’re immune enough to basically snub their noses at the industry,” he said.
“At some point in time Pulse Canada and its members will probably have to go to an industry-wide level of service challenge.”
