The announcement of a pasta plant built because of the Canadian Wheat Board dismantlement means all farmers have lost their market of best prices for their production.
The corporate wish to decouple the market has come about. What decoupling means is there will no longer be a market price; the farmers’ income to come from government payments, off-farm income and contract sales of product at corporate discretion. The corporation will be getting raw materials at as close to zero price as possible.
In the past, Cargill has stated that its goal was to influence the demise of the CWB to allow this to happen. Farmers will be taken back to the old-fashioned market owned by the multi-nationals whereby farmers signed contracts prior to seeding crops, prices, quantity, quality and delivery time set by the corporation….
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If he cannot deliver quantity and quality, he must purchase for that corporation the quantity and quality from the market at the price at time of delivery. For instance, if delivery was not possible after contracting at a price of $3 per bushel, he would have to pay that corporation $6 per bu. at the agreed delivery date. Destination grading and delivery payment would apply and if the market price on delivery date were only $2 per bu., all the corporation would have to do is downgrade the farmer’s grain to get it at the lower $2 per bu. price.
Yes, farmers will have their freedom to sell to whomever they wish when the wheat board is gone, but where is the freedom when you’ve lost ownership of your marketing board with the corporations now owning all of the market? Using basic Grade 6 mathematics, and the amount of money I got on wheat board payments alone on my own farm, the losses to each community would be from $250,000 to $1 million per year when we lose the CWB single desk pooling system.
We should be careful of what we wish for; it could cost us dearly in the end.
R.E. Kennedy,Simpson, Sask.
