When is a wheat board sale a wheat board sale?
Apparently not when it involves organic crops.
Although sales of organic wheat and barley show up on the Canadian
Wheat Board’s books, the board is making it clear they are not its
sales.
“The CWB is not marketing organic grain,” CWB organic marketing manager
Donna Youngdahl said in a letter printed in this week’s Western
Producer.
The letter was prompted by a news story in the Western Producer’s Feb.
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In the story, Youngdahl said sales of organic grain through the board
hit 57,766 tonnes in 2000-01. The story’s headline was, “CWB’s organic
sales up.”
Bill Rees and a number of other organic farmers took exception to the
article because it implied the board had made those sales on its own.
In fact, 80 percent of organic wheat and barley exports are sold
through the board’s accredited exporters. The other 20 percent is
marketed through producer direct sales.
Rees started an aggressive telephone campaign to get the wheat board to
publicly admit that it was not making the organic sales itself.
It worked … kind of.
Board spokesperson Deanna Allen wasn’t quite as definitive as Youngdahl.
“I don’t think that we can say that we’re not involved in the marketing
of it because there’s a control that we have on it and we are going to
report those volumes as we would report conventional grain. It’s a
difference of syntax over ‘marketing,’ I guess.”
Rees, who is president of Parkland Organic Crop Improvement
Association, said it is not simply a matter of semantics.
“It’s untrue. It’s inaccurate information,” he said.
“Anybody conducting a sale must first of all own the article, then you
have to find the buyer, you have to set the conditions of the sale and
agree on a price. And these people don’t fit all of that criteria.”
Rees said this is an important issue to clarify because he sees it as
“another initiative” of the wheat board to take over the organic
industry.
- ational Farmers Union president Stewart Wells said he agrees the wheat
board is not technically marketing organic wheat and barley right now,
but he hopes it will in the future.
“It’s pretty easy to find an organic farmer who has had trouble getting
paid for grain that they’re marketing,” said Wells, who operates an
organic farm in Swift Current, Sask.
“That’s of course one of the huge advantages of working with the
Canadian Wheat Board. You know at the end of the day you’re going to
get paid.”
